Daily Verse | Exodus 7:16
The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the desert.
It’s Monday and the last full week of January. If the toast always lands buttered side down, butter the other side.
I’m planning to close my Facebook account at the end of this week, less than a year after rejoining the online platform after taking an eight-week break last year. I’ve been letting my community there know what I’m doing and encouraging them to subscribe to this blog and to join me on other social media platforms.
I plan to make this leaving permanent for a couple of reasons, the primary one being the power of Big Tech. I was astounded when both Twitter and Facebook banned president Trump from their platforms after the breach of the Capitol. Both blamed Trump for the violence even before all the facts were known.
Who takes it upon themselves to ban the leader of the free world? Who has been granted enough power to silence the most powerful leader in the world? Who has the nerve to shut down the chief executive of their own country?
Then came the shocking, coordinated destruction of the Parler platform, a social media alternative on which I had been building an account. Google, Apple and Amazon all denied Parler access to their platforms—for Google and Apple, that meant their app stores where consumers can download the Parler app—and for Amazon, that meant kicking Parler off their servers. All three accused Parler of allowing violent content on its platform, which the three said violated their terms of service for hosting the app.
After that, more than a dozen social media platforms banned Donald J. Trump and, as Axios put it, “accounts affiliated with pro-Trump violence and conspiracies.”
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All of this was done without judge, jury, witnesses or evidence. Their decisions were made not on some legal definition of “violence,” but on their own internal definitions of what violence is. Living as we do in a society in which “silence is violence” and “words are violence,” violence can be made to be pretty much any thing you need it to be.
To a free man in an ostensibly free society, the audacity of these three gargantuan businesses—each of which is essentially a monopoly—to wield such power with impunity is distressing. It is not only a frightening display of raw commercial power, it contradicts constitutional and cultural norms such as due process, individual liberty, and freedom of speech.
Therefore, I can no longer in good conscience be part of these platforms, which rely on me and the content I create to stay in business. Oh, I realize it’s not just me—it’s all of us. But I can only do my part, which is to starve them of the fraction of income that is based on my participation.
It is also my way of rebuking their fascist impulses, which are invariably biased toward censoring conservative content and voices—never the other way around.
All three gospels record Jesus sending out his twelve disciples to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven was near. Of interest is his instruction that, “If people do not welcome you, leave their town and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”
Symbolically, it meant that the disciples had done as instructed and were disclaiming any further responsibility for what happened to the people who rejected their message. It is similar to what we mean when we say, “I’m washing my hands of it.” We walk away with a clear conscience.
While not as life-altering as rejecting the gospel message, Facebook’s and Twitter’s rejection of our historic American values is destructive. They are not “pro” an America that I recognize, so I am shaking the dust off my feet and leaving them to their fate.
The United States is in deep weeds right now, in part because of the role played by social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. We need to take responsibility for what we can, find alternative means for staying connected, and follow as God leads.