LAKEWOOD, NJ – There’s a saying that suggests that a person should not say or write anything they don’t want to see the next morning on the front page of the New York Times.
It’s a wise piece of advice, but even more wise if you live in Ocean County and are upset with changes in your town, specifically in towns like Jackson, Toms River, Manchester, Brick, and Howell.
A recent news article by the Lakewood News Network, entitled ‘Jackson Residents Bash Their Town‘.
The article was made up entirely of comments private citizens, unaffiliated with the government made on Facebook about changes in Jackson Township over the past few years. It was a veiled attempt to put the people in the community on notice.
One Jackson resident, Erin Kasaba fought back against the Lakewood News Network and stated her comment was not only taken out of context, but edited and rewritten by a LNN writer.
LNN corrected itself, sort of. LNN said Kasaba said Jackson ‘stinks’, but what she actually said was, “What stinks is not Jackson itself, but the local government.”
A completely legitimate comment about local government, twisted by a biased newsroom editor.
“It’s really offensive that people make fake posts like this to stir up controversy so they can print it on outside websites,” Kasaba said.
Whatever you say on Facebook can and will be used against you.
Whether it’s in the court of public law or the court of public opinion, you are being watched. Comments are being logged for future court cases and current court cases. The goal of the effort is simple. How are comments being made in the court of public opinion affecting the governing bodies of those towns?
Are elected officials reacting in favor or negative comments? In many court cases in the county, those public comments by private citizens have been used as evidence in civil rights cases against both Toms River and Jackson.
Right now, Toms River is engaged in a lawsuit claiming the town seized property for the sole purpose of preventing Jewish people from building on it and living there.
During the process, in that case, elected officials and those close to the matter are being deposed by lawyers and those lawyers are asking questions about private conversations, social media posts, social media groups and even private text messages.
Toms River is changing, aided by the efforts of Toms River Mayor Maurice Hill, who, just months before the 2019 election, was building a list of 10-acre properties for the township to buy. The goal was to purchase land, such as the Guttman property on Route 9, to prevent Jewish development.
Then, something happened. Mo Hill ran for mayor and began embracing the changes in the township. The plan worked. He won the election.
Since then, Toms River and the surrounding has been changing at a rapid pace. Hill, once a detractor, had become the Orthodox Jewish community’s biggest supporter in local politics. For Mo Hill, the change of heart paid off, but many residents in Toms River don’t see the upside enjoyed by Hill.
Those changes include a sort of religious gentrification going on in the northern section of Ocean County.
Many residents in towns like Jackson, Toms River, and other surrounding communities aren’t exactly thrilled to see their long-time neighbors move out of town and be replaced with transplants from places like Brooklyn, Canada, Ohio, and elsewhere, coming to Jackson to be part of the growing Orthodox Jewish community.
Most people keep to themselves about their opinions and feelings on the matter, but since it began en masse about five years ago, many have taken to Facebook to express their frustrations over the turning of their community. Many have lived in Jackson for decades and are the last line of generations still remaining in the town.
There’s no denying Jackson and Toms River are changing. Depending on who you are, it could be for the better or for the worse. Most fear the unknown. What will happen to the school system? Will Jackson schools be financially gutted like the nearby school district? How will the impending development boom affect the traffic? How will the demographic shift affect housing values and quality of life?
These are all unknowns, and what many fear most is the unknown. There are not exactly any case studies on the matter.
But what there are case studies for are the avalanche of lawsuits claiming violation of religious civil rights. Both Toms River and Jackson are or have been, involved in about a dozen high-profile civil rights cases involving the rights of newly arriving Orthodox Jewish residents having their rights violated.
The Department of Justice has weighed in on the topic in both towns. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office is actively investigating allegations in Jackson, and land developers have sued both towns for denying development projects on the basis of alleged discrimination.
One thing that is consistent is that comments believed to be protected and private by their authors on Facebook are now being used against them, whether it’s in articles such as the one published by the Lakewood News Network or in court cases like those in Jackson.
And it’s not just the interested parties who are keeping an eye on social media activity. Ocean County Sheriff Michael Mastronardy employs a technology that effectively spies on people’s social media accounts, giving him a detailed view of your postings on multiple social media platforms.
We had asked the sheriff recently to talk about the system he uses and he denied our request.
That system allegedly tracks users across multiple platforms and profiles, giving the sheriff’s office a real-time battlefield portal of the social media world where he can see who is saying what and about who, as it happens.
The sheriff often boasts about the alleged system. Mastronardy has said he uses the system as any other public safety tool, but others say he also uses it to monitor the chatter of dissent in the community. These allegations have never been proven as the sheriff has denied the media access to see the system and has not officially acknowledged its use.
The moral of the story is Facebook, once the place where people shared pictures of their dogs and children, has devolved into a sort of political and social battlefield where beneficiaries of legal battles are keeping a close eye.
In the past, expressing your opinions and feelings on Facebook had no real consequences. These days, news websites are publishing those opinions in an effort to shame and embarrass residents. They’re also being used as evidence in multi-million civil rights lawsuits.
Some say the monitoring and ‘doxing’ are meant to intimidate people who disagree with what is going on around them. It is meant to squelch public opposition. Others say that being a public platform, all conversations on the platform are part of the greater public record that can and will be used against you in a court of law at some point.