Was it really necessary to post private discussions on public?
Yes. Any attempts, and I do not care by who, of even remote manipulation, coercion, threats and many other things instantly get posted by me. Aside from myself, the PMs can be read by the administrators, the datacenter technicians, Cloudflare, and the NSA. They are public as is anyways.
It seems like a pretty simple attempt to find out what your reasoning was. Under your definitions, anyone who doesn't simply agree with you without question is attempting to "manipulate the trust system".