One of my missions in the graphics team was to make a fake website.

This mission was extra special, confidential, and for members with “good faith” because we were shown some of the negative things posted online about the church. All other members were forbidden from going online.

(After leaving, I realized that even what they showed us was only a curated and censored version of the story showing the church as a victim.)

I was supposed to pretend to be a normal person questioning the WMSCOG and writing blog posts to investigate the negative claims from a “neutral” outsider’s perspective.

In fact, I created the website at the instruction of and under the direct guidance of the church. The purpose of the site was to lure in doubters and counter the negative rumors about the church to reel them back in.

There were ten of us managing ten different fake websites. Our goal was to have our own websites fill up the first page of Google searches to push down legitimate sites questioning and criticizing the WMSCOG’s doctrines.

As part of this effort, members were also instructed to make videos addressing various points of criticism against the church, to vouch for the church.

One of the topics was abortion, and the videos claimed that the WMSCOG does not encourage abortions and supports childbirth within the church.

Because of my past experience, this topic got under my skin.