So earlier this week, I receive and accept an invitation to join the Anaheim Canyon Community Coalition’s Facebook group. It’s a closed FB group of about 180 people. Members post information and news about Anaheim.
Posted by the page administrator was this message:
“Hi all, Thanks for the feedback. This ACCC page welcomes all posts from ALL sides. Some posts are emotional, some are straight forward and true, and some are twisted and false.”
The message went on to describe the ACCC Board’s activities and the groups mission.
Taking him at his word, yesterday I submitted a link to my Anaheim Blog story about Councilwoman Kris Murray’s proposal to bring back the Home Improvement Holiday (posts on the ACCC FB page have to be approved by an administrator). It was a completely positive, truthful and straightforward post, and as was my accompanying comment on the Anaheim Canyon Community Coalition page. It was reviewed and approved.
This morning, my post was gone, and I have been removed as a member of the ACCC Facebook group.
So much for “welcoming all posts from ALL sides.”
UPDATE: On the Anaheim Hills Buzz FB page, I posed a question to ACCC leader Cheryl Knutson:
An interesting position for the ACCC leadership to adopt: it doesn’t matter whether what you’re saying is true or false, what matters is who you are. Under that policy, Jason Young is permitted to publish lots and lots of vicious, untrue and half-true posts on the ACCC Facebook page because he is a wedding videographer and not a public affairs consultant and is — as far as we know — earns no income from politics and pubic affairs.
And apparently the ACCC leadership has no objection to their FB page being “taken over” by a partisan with a criminal record. it seems there are exceptions to the ACCC leadership “it’s not the message, it’s the messenger” policy.
For the record, I had no intention of following Jason Young’s lead and plastering the ACCC FB page with every Anaheim Blog post. Unfortunately, Steve McKay and Cheryl Knutson preferred to shoot-first-and-ask-questions-never, so they’ll never find that out.
All sides are equal. But some sides are more equal than others.
C’mon Matt, you know better than that. An open dialogue can lead to understanding and (gasp!) consensus on some issues, which may actually move issues forward. We can’t have that!
LOL, that’s funny, why invite you in the first place? Sounds a little suspicious if you ask me, are they afraid you might expose something about their little group? Either way, I wouldn’t be too hurt if I were you.
I usually remove people from my public FB page when they name call, “Cyber” bully people, or excessively curse. Check it out…
https://www.facebook.com/SupportersOfAnaheimPolice
This group started inviting people off of our private FB page – they seemed so above board. I’m really shocked that they are censoring people they’ve invited to join them. I will spread the word with our group – this is clearly a political group and most people on the Anaheim Hills Buzz FB page are just interested in community not politics. Thank you for informing us.
Matt, wear your ejection from that group with pride. Steve McKay and the rest are a bunch of hypocrites.
That is hysterical. McKay is a Tait plant that goes to his church. Sounds like he is more worried about ACCC members reading some of your other stories. Better to keep the other 179 in the dark lest they learn some unpleasant truth and defect before writing a check to theTait 2014 campaign.
So your first post to the group was a blog-shilling link to a regurgitation of a political press release, and you’re shocked — shocked! — that someone booted you out of their private group for that bit of self-advertisement? Sure, maybe they should have let you off with a warning or something, but it’s not as if you were doing your part to elevate the dialog.
(And I’m sure that, like the Chavez-lovin’ Facebook page of the random former OCCORD staffer that you dredged up, we’re supposed to take away some kind of wider lesson about the freedom-hating ways of your enemies, but as the old saw goes, the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.)
If the rest of us we’re half as smart as Biff believes himself to be, we’d all be super-geniuses!
Biff – the post Matt gave was a positive one about Anaheim bringing back the Home Improvement Holiday – something people in the Hills will likely embrace. It wasn’t devisive or even political. Clearly you have your bias but your comment does not hold water on this issue. And if this group ACCC or whatever claims to welcome all viewpoints then they are acting like hypocrites.
Well, hey. With Matthew’s update, it turns out that I was wrong about ACCC’s reasons for casting him out (especially if they’d been allowing Jason Young to do the same thing with his usual annoying frequency, as seems to be the case). I’m still not sure why it is we’re supposed to care, though. Search Google for Anaheim Canyon Community Coalition, and this page seems to be the only result. Obviously ACCC is a powerful organization with lots and lots of sinister ties!
Given the city is moving into another election cycle and this group has formed for what appears to be an orchestrated effort to promote Mayor Tait and criticize the other members of the council, I think they are relevant albeit not necessarily powerful. It is an overstatement to sarcastically imply their ties are sinister – just clearly one-sided, which is fine if you are not selling your group as open to all sides and a forum for open, honest, ethical dialogue.
Wow – just wow – cannot believe they are allowing this Jason Young person to say all of these horrible things and won’t allow one comment about home improvement efforts in the city. I will spread the word – the Hills won’t be easily fooled by this group.
The fact that McKay and Knutson allow convicted criminal, JSY, to post says volumes.
Let us not forget the PAC committee JSY and Tait formed together with their parent’s money. I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars of their folks’ hard earned cash that they managed to flush down the toilet for them.