Our rationalization is based on common-law traditions regarding whether communications made explicitly in the presence of or shared with third parties, either spontaneously or by agreement, are considered private. We don't feel this is a stretch, as this same communication made in person and recorded, and then subsequently shared with another group, would not be afforded any privacy, regardless of what the original parties wish.
This is an excellent conversation to have, however. Thank you for your replies.
That might be the technical reasoning behind your believing you could do it, but the spirit of both the requests to share is fairly clear. Even if you feel you didn't violate some sort of agreement to keep the sharing limited, I feel you violated a trust by doing this.
It feels hurtful and wrong to use these conversations to help paint what I suspect was a lot of people individually deciding that they wanted to vote elsewhere for their own reasons, based on the behavior of the witness team in question, rather than on any 'bullying' by one person.
What is to be gained by this? Showing everyone you are upset and bothered by some unvotes? Imagine standing up in a group and pointing at another person and claiming, "That guy, he is telling everyone to not support me, look at how bad that guy is!"
Where is that a reasoned and mature behavior?
I had kept my tiny, insignificant witness vote present, because I didn't feel the team had been doing anything I couldn't at least somewhat support, regardless of who was on it.
This however is a bit much. I welcome the day when the witness team begins acting more rational and I can return my vote.
I'm surprised you don't think that exposing possible coercion or undue influence against witness voters is not a worthy goal. As mentioned earlier, we had that reasoning explicitly given to us, and we had this message from Aggroed. Unless you're trying not to, it is pretty easy to draw a logical inference from one to the other.
That said, if Aggroed isn't behind this, and there is some other party or parties involved, we would like to make that known as well. Putting this out publicly was a conscious decision to draw attention to what we were told and what we believe is happening. There's nothing immature or unreasonable about exposing corruption or coercion.
Indeed, the tactic to discredit and gaslight is a well-established, well-known countermove when the facts hit a little to close to home.