unfortunately this is not a useful solution for Verve, which breaks if i make a copy of it in order to customize anything.

Thanks for this. I would recommend that the theme be updated to respect the “social sliders” setting. I changed the code on the template (before your post, but thanks all the same) to effect this but I can see for novice/non-technical users it could be extremely dangerous to publicize members of a group who may not want to be public.