Facebook is Not Our Friend

We really need to be aware of the way that the supposedly neutral platforms we use, like Facebook and Twitter, are in fact tipping the scales in a particular political and cultural direction.  This is one of the reasons I’ve backed way off of Facebook use, and leaned more toward my blog, which I think I’m going to be doing even more of going forward.  Facebook’s owner and top people are all progressives.  But then most or all big corporations these days, not just tech companies, are.  They go with the flow in order to avoid trouble.  In tech, though, there are a lot of true believers.  Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc- all are very much part of pushing the progressive agenda, and we Christians need to be aware.  A social media platform absolutely depends on its users to create content that will draw in eyeballs.  But when we know that it is using us not just to make money for itself (which we already knew) but also to shape the national narrative in an anti-Christian direction, then I think we have to do some serious thinking about how (or if) we use this platform any more.

I think one of the things that means is creating our own spaces for discussion that can’t be curated or moderated by them, or at least not so easily.  So, let’s have more of our discussions on our own blogs.  You put something on Facebook, then Facebook is in control of who sees it.  Facebook can still be a useful tool in some respects, but it’s increasingly apparent that it is not a neutral platform for discussion.  So let’s do more of that in spaces we control ourselves.

When I first started blogging, that’s where all the action was and it was relatively easy to get readers and get discussions going.  Facebook really sucked all the oxygen out of the blogosphere for a long time.  Big blogs still did fine, but nobody was going and visiting the blogs of friends and acquaintances any more like they used to.  They’d just look at Facebook.  I know I did a lot of my lighter updating, and even some of the more serious writing, on Facebook, for a while.  But they control that platform.  Who knows when anything that doesn’t fit the whole progressive agenda will be declared a hate crime and just deleted?  At least my blog, hosted on a smaller host and with content entirely controlled by me, is a lot more under my control than that.  It would be significantly more difficult to suppress it.