Moderating

About 15 years ago I served a year as the Moderator of the South Dakota Conference of the United Church of Christ. In that conference, the role of the moderator is to chair the business session of the annual meeting. There are a few other duties, such as attending all of the meetings of the Board of Directors, serving on the Annual Meeting Planning Committee, and representing the Conference at a few national meetings. These days, I assume that it means a lot of Zoom meetings, but back then it meant a lot of driving across the state for meetings. I remember one time when I drove from Rapid City to Yankton, attended a meeting, and then drove back to Rapid City that afternoon and evening. That’s a six-hour drive, a two-hour meeting and another six-hour drive in a 14-hour day. It wasn’t very efficient being moderator of the conference.

I’ve attended a lot of meetings and a lot of them have been what we call annual meetings, the once-a-year ritual of electing officers, adopting budgets, and discussing policies that mark all kinds of church organizations. I have some distinct feelings about how a meeting should be run. As moderator, I tried to minimize routine business, showing the Conference how groups of agenda items, such as establishing rules of order, adopting minutes, and receiving reports can be accomplished through consent without the need for extensive debate. I ruled that motions brought by groups of people did not require a second, as a second was assured and saved time. The meetings I moderated were a bit shorter than some I have attended.

I don’t think I was a memorable moderator. If you were to ask the people of South Dakota what was memorable about the annual meeting I moderated, I doubt that they would mention my role in the meeting. They might remember that the preacher for the first night’s worship had to cancel at the last minute. They might remember that the meeting elected an interim Conference Minister in the wake of the resignation of the previous Conference Minister. But they are unlikely to remember my role.

Nonetheless, moderating is a challenging and essential task. It is required wherever people gather to meet, speak, discern and decide. A week ago, I had a conversation with the immediate past moderator of our congregation and heard once again about how exhausting it was for him to serve in that role, and how pleased he is that we now have a new moderator. That is often how it feels to have finished a term of service as a moderator.

In order for a group of people to engage in civil conversation there need to be rules to govern their speech. Unrestrained free speech without any rules is simply a shouting match in which no one listens, no opinions are changed, and no agreement can be reached. Even meetings of the Libertarian Party require rules.

Henry Martyn Robert was an engineering officer in the Army. When he was asked to preside over a public meeting in a church he discovered that he did not know how to do the job. His attempt embarrassed him greatly. His experience at the church meeting led him to research the subject of how to preside over public meetings. What he discovered was virtual parliamentary anarchy, with different members having differing ideas of correct procedure. To bring order out of that chaos, he wrote “Robert’s Rules of Order.” Eventually the book, now in its twelfth edition, has become the standard for moderating public meetings. The rules have been adopted by state legislatures and congress and are the official rules of order for countless public meetings. It seems that if you can bring order to a church meeting, you can bring order to anything, including a deeply divided partisan legislature.

With my experience and a smattering of knowledge about how meetings are organized, I wonder if Elon Musk has any idea what it means to be the head of Twitter. I’m no expert in Twitter. I do have an account, but I use it to read the tweets of others and rarely post any tweets myself. I’m not much for spewing aphorisms, and I am suspicious of how much misinformation is communicated through the site. It is clear, however, that the platform does require rules.

Mr. Musk says he is a “free speech absolutist.” Nonetheless, the site will still need to be moderated, as was demonstrated by his need yesterday to clarify what he meant when he tweeted about free speech. “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law” he said. Of course Twitter is an international platform, which means that the law is not a singular entity but a complex network of different laws in different countries. With all of the different posts in all of the different languages, it is difficult to know what it means for a tweet to “match the law.”

Congressional committees and judges are trying to determine whether or not tweets encouraging the storming of Capitol hill in Washington crossed the line into insurrection. Lawsuits have been filed in an attempt to clarify the line between criticism and libel. Parents, schools, and youth organizations know all too well that hate speech quickly becomes abuse and harassment. Twitter is known as a platform for bullying.

However he sees his role, however much he calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” his $44 billion dollar investment has bought him the need to spend a lot of time thinking about and resourcing the policing of Twitter. The man already is the titular head of five different companies. It is my hunch that this new company will take him deeply into the weeds when it comes to moderation rules and policies. He must either provide leadership and direction for the company or allow it to devolve into continuous lawsuit and charges of illegal behavior. The January 6 insurrection is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the need for the platform to provide structure so that users are able to express themselves.

I hope that another of Mr. Musk’s companies, Tesla, is successful in advancing the technology of driverless cars. Because Mr. Musk is going to lose a lot of sleep over this new role and a lack of sleep makes one a very dangerous driver.

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