F.A.C.T.Net's new direction

[April 12, 1999]

"The advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people… Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion… Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression." From United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted December 1948. In full in many languages at <http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/index.htm>


This Spring 1999, FACTNet is entering into a new phase of our development.

FACTNet’s settlement of the long and costly litigation with Scientology in March has freed us from focusing narrowly on combating Scientology. Since FACTNet’s time and resources can now be invested elsewhere, we have decided to embark upon a more comprehensive and exciting interpretation of our mission as the Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network.

Cults will still be our predominant interest. However, we will be widening the coercive tactics we cover to include psychological coercion practiced not only by cults but also by totalitarian governments, business training/management courses, advertisers and salespeople, interpersonal relationships, and any other areas in which psychological coercion is present. FACTNet will be to psychological coercion to what Amnesty International is to physical coercion (although FACTNet will not deal primarily with government abuse as Amnesty does). This broader focus will be reflected on our web site, upcoming daily newswire, and newsletter.

Simultaneous to broadening the coercive tactics we expose, we are also consolidating the organization to concentrate on our areas of our greatest strength: the web site, news services, and referrals.

The FACTNet web site is undergoing a major renovation, both to reflect our broader focus and to update our design to one more technological, professional, and aesthetic. The site will be slimmed down and better organized, so people will more easily find what they are looking for. We will eventually include quick reference lists such as the ten most destructive cults, ten most coercive governments, and ten most choice respecting advertisements. Our goal is to make the FACTNet site the foremost place to research psychological coercion, to be the single most comprehensive source on this topic. We will act as a primary source only for a limited amount of educational material and for news. The balance of the web site will be a well organized system of referrals to numerous primary sources: books, experts, counselors, organizations, researchers, web sites. This will streamline the FACTNet web site as well as FACTNet’s expenses. The new site will be up Monday, April 12.

We are also planning changes for our news services. Currently, FACTNet’s sources of news consist of our quarterly newsletter and headline stories that appear on the web site at a rate varying from one per week to one per weekday. We still plan to produce the newsletter quarterly, although we will try to transmit a higher percentage (perhaps even all) by email rather than by postal mail, to cut our costs. The vast majority of newsletter expenses are printing and postage for the 9,500 newsletters sent by postal mail. The 2,000 sent by email and the version posted on the web site incur no such costs.

As for the intermittent headline stories posted to the web site, we plan instead to provide more but briefer news pieces every weekday, so that each weekday all major news for the day in the field of coercive persuasion will receive exposure. We will also choose a daily coercion-related fact to highlight, in the form of "Did you know….?" The daily news and fact will not only appear on the front of the FACTNet web site, but will also be available for email subscription service, so people can choose to receive news delivered daily to their email inbox, free of charge, starting with the new web site April 12. (To subscribe to the newswire, please send an email to < XXX-Obsolete.email.Deleted-XXX >. To subscribe to both the newsletter and the newswire, please see form at <http://www.factnet.org>).

FACTNet will also be expanding its referral service to include several important areas. The first is a good book list, which we can set up with the help of amazon.com and even earn a percentage of books purchased from Amazon because of our referrals. The second area is an expansion to encompass our wider vision of psychological coercion, such as specialists in influence and experts on totalitarian governments. The third area is a more general expansion to include many referrals related to cult awareness that we have inadvertently overlooked.

Simultaneously, through April FACTNet will be working to comply with the injunction of the legal settlement, which involves purging all electronic and physical records of any upper level Scientology materials.

We hope many will benefit from our new direction and services. We expect that an understanding of influence in a variety of arenas -- from advertisements to government propaganda -- will act as a preventative against the serious psychological coercion practiced by cults. All comments are welcome; please email < XXX-Obsolete.email.Deleted-XXX >.