BY NOW THE sins of Facebook, as a social media platform and megacorporation, are well-known. You’ve got invasions of privacy, data breaches, viral falsehoods, livestreamed rapes and murders, and the list goes on.
Well, a few months ago, the volunteer technology committee at the Catholic parish where my wife, Polly, works as social responsibility minister did something about it. They asked their parish council to consider taking the congregation off Facebook entirely and no longer using the platform as a medium of communication. When Polly told me about this, I was a little surprised. Maybe I missed something, but, amid the sporadic calls to “Delete Facebook” in the wake of the company’s various scandals, I hadn’t heard of a religious community actually implementing a boycott.
Once you think about it, the arguments for boycotting Facebook are pretty obvious. When we lend our eyeballs to that platform, we bring it advertising dollars, helping to fund its corrupt and dangerous practices. And what’s worse, the company’s business model makes every person or organization with a Facebook page a recruiter for the company and turns every posted detail of our lives into a product (consumer data) that the company can sell to commercial and political advertisers. When a congregation encourages parishioners to log onto a church Facebook page and share what they find there with interested friends, the church places its members and friends at risk of having personal information exposed to bad actors. In addition, when a church recruits members and friends onto Facebook, it brings those loved ones into a media environment rife with campaigns of mass deception that the company willfully refuses to weed out.
Given all that, why would any ethical, socially responsible organization such as your church (or this magazine) continue to make Facebook a part of its outreach strategy? Well, that’s pretty self-evident, too: Facebook is where almost everyone is. Seventy percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, so the platform has effectively made itself the public square. Facebook is that worst possible spawn of the capitalist system—an unregulated monopoly. Even people who think they aren’t on Facebook actually are, because they’re on Instagram or WhatsApp, potential competitors that Facebook bought out years ago.
So if we’re not going to just talk to ourselves, we need to be on Facebook, this argument goes. After all, didn’t Jesus risk guilt-by-association when he went home with the Roman collaborator and extorter, Zacchaeus, and publicly dined with other notorious and unclean sinners?
So there’s the Facebook dilemma that confronts any religious congregation. Do you collaborate with manifest evil, or do you risk isolation and irrelevance? As I write, my wife’s parish is still discussing the issue. Maybe yours should too.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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