Discord is a free computer and mobile device application that facilitates group communication via text, media sharing, voice and video. People who use Discord group themselves into “servers,” or channels accessed by those who are invited to the group. (Submitted photo)
Online posts raise concerns over privacy, transparency
- Published: January 30, 2025
A group of messages shared in a local Facebook group earlier this month has raised questions, both broad and specific, about transparency and ethics within public bodies and the separation of public identities from private ones.
Public discussion of these questions began Saturday, Jan. 4, when local resident TJ Turner posted a range of screenshots from a Discord server to the Facebook page Yellow Springs Open Discussion.
Discord is a free computer and mobile device application that facilitates group communication via text, media sharing, voice and video. People who use Discord group themselves into “servers,” or channels accessed by those who are invited to the group.
The screenshots Turner shared were taken from the Discord server of Springers 4 More Springers, or S4MS. As the News reported in June 2024, S4MS is a local group that aims to work with local elected bodies and residents to reform the Village zoning code, support affordable housing initiatives and serve as an advocate for tenants. S4MS has most recently worked to support the proposed LIHTC affordable housing project — about which more can be read in this week’s story, “LIHTC project advances.”
Turner wrote in the Jan. 4 Facebook post that screenshots from the Discord server were shared with him by a “concerned citizen,” and stated a concern that school board members Judith Hempfling and Rebecca Potter had joined the server and had attended or hosted potluck gatherings/meetings with members of S4MS.
As Turner wrote in the Facebook post: “There is a private lobbying group in town calling themselves ‘Springers for More Springers’ (S4MS). They have been holding meetings, to include with our elected officials, and swaying their actions on both the School Board, as well as on Village Council.”
Turner’s comment referred to the discussion within the posted screenshots, which includes partial minutes from S4MS meetings, some of which were held at Potter’s home; discussion between Hempfling, Potter, YS Home, Inc. Executive Director Emily Seibel and other members of S4MS, whose names are blocked out, on a GoFundMe campaign initiated to help pay for an application to subdivide and rezone the 3.6-acre parcel of Morgan Fields eyed for the LIHTC project; reminders of upcoming meetings of S4MS and discussion of upcoming agenda items; and a July 1 email in which Hempfling states that she and Potter have been attending S4MS meetings, but “not representing the school board.”
The screenshots, in their entirety, may be viewed at bit.ly/S4MS_Screenshots. The screenshots posted to Facebook include notations, in red, characterizing the content of the Discord messages; a second copy of the screenshots, shared with the News by Potter, includes further notations intended to clarify those characterizations. Both documents are included at the above link.
Then, on Monday, Jan. 6, Turner made a second post to the YS Open Discussion Facebook page, noting that two members of the News staff — Reilly Dixon and this reporter — had joined the S4MS Discord server in June ahead of the paper’s June report on the purpose and scope of the group.
His concern, in part, was a comment from Dixon — who, in addition to reporting, also does production and ad design work for the News — communicating with members of S4MS within the Discord server about an ad the group had placed last summer, recommending that group members remove their four signatures from the ad, as they had already been “heavily mentioned and quoted” in the News’ June article. Dixon stated he was working with members of S4MS to adjust the copy on their ad to suit their needs, in a similar manner as he and other production staffers at the News work with all advertisers.
Turner’s second concern was that News staffers had not reported on the presence of school board members within the S4MS Discord channel or at S4MS meetings.
Turner wrote in the screenshots’ accompanying Facebook post: “At first read [it] appears that these YS News reporters are actively helping the S4MS group, ensuring that the S4MS group is ‘heavily mentioned and quoted.’ … Since you clearly have access to the S4MS discord channel, and your reporters are members of that channel, how about publish all the correspondence for the public to see?”
Both posts garnered a number of comments from local residents, with some questioning whether the involvement of school board members in S4MS in both the Discord server and the group’s meetings constituted a violation of the Open Meetings Act — a part of Ohio’s Sunshine Law that requires public bodies, like the school board, to conduct public business in meetings that are open to public attendance or observation.
Board transparency
The News reached out to legal counsel for the Ohio School Boards Association, or OSBA, for clarification on the Open Meetings Act and whether it had been violated in the S4MS Discord.
A representative said the OSBA could not provide comment on the specific matters at hand in Yellow Springs, but provided background information on Open Meetings Act requirements and pointed the News to the state’s exhaustive Sunshine Law Manual.
In particular, page 111 of the manual defines a “meeting” of a public body as “a prearranged gathering of a majority of the members of a public body for the purpose of discussing public business,” and includes electronic communications in its broader definition.
In general, gatherings of fewer than a majority of a public body’s members — in the school board’s case, fewer than three members — do not constitute a “meeting” and are not subject to the same regulations.
Speaking with the News earlier this month, Turner said that he did not believe that Hempfling and Potter violated the Open Meetings Act in making comments on the Discord server, since only the two of them ever did so — a “majority” of members was not present. However, he said his concerns extend beyond that requirement of Ohio law and into best practices for the transparency of a public body. He took issue with Hempfling’s email statement, noted earlier in this report, that neither she nor Potter were officially representing the school board with regard to S4MS.
“It may not be an Open Meetings Act violation, but it is not what they said they would do as elected officials,” Turner said. “It’s unethical, in my opinion, because they are absolutely representing the board in front of a group that they did not tell the board that they were representing themselves in front of.”
Turner added — noting his experience as a former school board member who served for five years — that he believes it would have been prudent for Hempfling and Potter to have the school board approve their participation in S4MS, and to report the content of those meetings publicly at subsequent meetings of the board.
“We’ve done that in the past at other meetings — the [YS Development Corporation] meetings get discussed and brought into the board packet,” he said. “So why not this one?”
Potter, who also spoke to the News this month — and noted that she was speaking on her own behalf, and not that of the school board — said she believes there’s a difference between meetings of the YSDC, a quasi-governmental body, and S4MS, a citizen-led group.
“I really don’t think any government body, including a school board, can compel a community group organizing around an issue to publish their minutes,” she said. “And why would we? They’re not a government body.”
Turner said he also believed that the Discord server messages illustrated that Potter was “conducting board business months before she was authorized by the board” to do so with regard to the LIHTC project. He referred to the fact that, in September 2024, Potter was chosen as one of two board representatives to an intergovernmental task force with Village Council to continue exploring options for the proposed LIHTC project.
The Sunshine Law Manual also notes that the “Open Meetings Act requires the members of a public body to discuss and deliberate on official business only in open meetings.”
For her part, Potter said she did not believe any of the messages she or Hempfling shared regarding aspects of the LIHTC in the Discord server constituted either discussion or deliberation of “official business.” Everything mentioned in the server, she said, had already been discussed and deliberated on with the rest of the members of the school board in public sessions dating back to a May 21, 2024, meeting, when the board first approved resolutions to explore the possibility of selling district land for an affordable housing project.
Meeting agendas and accompanying documents were available to the public to reference discussion points brought up in the Discord, as was video of public sessions.
Potter also pushed back on the notion that she was precluded from discussing anything already in the public record outside of school board meetings, regardless of her appointment to the intergovernmental task force — though she noted that she had been tasked to work with Hempfling on “investigating the feasibility of the LIHTC project” at the board’s May 21 meeting.
In a broader sense, Potter said, her view is that the First Amendment protects the rights of citizens to gather and express themselves — including school board members meeting with community members on their own time. However, she said she feels that the First Amendment rights of members of S4MS who don’t hold public office have been “threatened” by the sharing of their messages online without their consent.
“Secretly taking information and distorting it to undermine the credibility of the group and imply that they are breaking the law — that is intimidating, that is silencing,” she said.
Turner said his sharing the messages online was not an attempt to silence anyone, but instead to bring the group’s activity into the public arena. He said he does not plan to pursue any legal action against the group, but that he believes Hempfling and Potter’s involvement with S4MS “needs to come to light so that people can see what their elected officials are doing.”
“That’s transparency,” he said. “That’s how you do work in the public eye.”
S4MS members respond
With regard to S4MS as a whole, Turner said he believes that the group qualifies as a political action committee, or PAC, and should register as such.
He cited Ohio Revised Code Section 3517.01, which defines a political action committee as “a combination of two or more persons, the primary or major purpose of which is to support or oppose any candidate, political party, or issue, or to influence the result of any election through express advocacy.”
“They have not registered with the state of Ohio; they don’t have a treasurer; they’re not disclosing who’s giving them money,” Turner said. “They’re actually in violation of law.”
Jessica Thomas, a local resident and member of S4MS, said the group does not meet the definition of a PAC.
Thomas has hosted several group meetings at her home, and said that, while the group has advocated for zoning reform, affordable housing and tenants’ rights, they are not a “formal advocacy group” and haven’t spoken for or against any candidates, parties or ballot issues — local or otherwise — since their formation.
“Springers 4 More Springers is not a single-issue group,” she said. “We’re organizing around really public topics, and our goal was transparency.”
Thomas said that, at the outset, S4MS had an “open-door policy,” in which anyone who asked was invited to join their Discord server, and all were welcome to attend their meetings. They asked that all those who joined the Discord server introduce themselves, and later, those who had not done so were removed from the group for inactivity. For that reason, she said, it’s unclear who captured and shared the Discord server messages with Turner. No one asked S4MS to share their messages publicly, she said, and the messages were shared out of chronological order and removed from their wider contexts.
“There were things shared in those messages that had to do with people’s private lives — they had nothing to do with the LIHTC project,” she said. “Presenting these decontextualized messages publicly is incredibly problematic.”
Specifically, she pointed to one notation on the screenshot document alleging “elected officials handling district money” — which referred to a GoFundMe campaign S4MS initiated to pay for an application for subdivision and rezoning, she said, specifically to avoid using school district money.
“It’s disingenuous to suggest that [S4MS] was doing anything untoward with money,” she said. “We collected money for a certain purpose, contacted our donors to ensure that they were okay with what the money was going toward and ensured that the expenditure matched what we said we were going to spend money on.”
April Wolford — another member of S4MS and a Home, Inc. board member who said she has a long history working in advocacy and activist spaces — said she feels “deeply troubled” about both the public sharing of the Discord messages and the wider tenor of discussion around the LIHTC project over the last year, particularly on social media. As an alumna of Antioch College, she recalled that the college used to hold regular forum events, in which folks came face-to-face to learn about and discuss a wide variety of issues.
“We don’t have those forums now — and social media does not serve that purpose,” she said.
She added that the “younger generation of activists” increasingly uses forums like Discord and Slack to organize and disseminate information. The possibility of having that information shared without their permission, she said, means they often “can’t be vulnerable in the spaces where they’ve chosen to have these conversations.”
“You can’t screenshot a face-to-face conversation — but you can in Discord,” she said.
Wolford said she wishes those who had concerns about S4MS had reached out to the group directly rather than disseminating its messages online, and then discussing those concerns within a Facebook group.
“Posting salvos online, it’s like, ‘You shoot, then I shoot,’” she said. “It’s a very different thing from a dialog, where you can see when you say things that hurt people — or maybe discover that your opinion is not that different from mine.”
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