This post is going to take on the task already better endeavored by men such as Neil Postman, Robert Putnam, and Alexis de Tocqueville.  My argument won’t be as elegant, but perhaps will serve as a clarifying reminder to our readers or a stab at answering some of the difficult questions posed to us by social media.*

Last week, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen recommended that the federal government create a new digital privacy regulator to police technology giants.  Purportedly, we need this type of government intervention to resolve the dangers that Facebook presents to our society, because it has potential to “harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.”  Facebook (and social media in general) has been proven to be addictive, socially divisive, and powerfully influential in political events and movements.  Haugen asserts that Facebook even has power over our “deepest thoughts, feelings and behavior.”  Most poignantly, she argues that Facebook cannot be left alone—it is too potent and too self-interested to make just choices on behalf of the common good.  And so, to achieve the common good, Haugen turns to Congress. 

Ironically, her argument sets up support for despotism, not against it; against democracy, not for it.  Government monitoring of social media will replace one autonomous, unaccountable entity with another.  Transferring power from Facebook to Congress (and, ultimately, to an unelected bureaucratic arm) will not enable majority rule over free speech or social order.  Neither institution has the capacity to care intelligently about the individuals being harmed, and both have a vested interest in moving the masses towards a particular political viewpoint and action. 

At its best or its worst, fundamentally Facebook is an online pseudo human society where we expose ourselves to what is best and worst in human beings.  There are fewer protections within this society because of the addictive nature of technology and the isolation it enforces upon us.  The online community is more prone to succumbing to mobocracy or oligarchy, to influencing us to think in terms of the shadows it shows us rather than the reality it obscures. By participating in social media, understanding the dangers it poses to ourselves and our society, at some level we willingly choose to be tyrannized. We don’t want to offend the petty, complicated uniformity imposed upon us.  We justify this participation by telling ourselves that we cannot live successfully in the modern world without having some kind of internet presence.  Besides, how could we forsake the potential for influence that these platforms afford?

Haugen’s comments to Congress are the ultimate confession that we are so isolated and weak as democratic individuals that we cannot accomplish freedom from tech tyranny for ourselves.  The problems with social media shows us our worst selves as a democratic people.  It is easier for us to turn to government to ask for intervention than to turn to ourselves to protect our own souls and direct our own actions.  Thus the real danger doesn’t lie in a trillion-dollar company that refuses to transparently engage its consumer base.  It lies in us, the consumers.  

The remedy for our democratic sickness must come, not from bigger government controls, but from more self-controlled individuals.  The best protection against the tyranny of social media is to invigorate our own free will.

Let me propose that for the Christian, the questions we ask about social media ought to be inverted: can we live healthy, influential, godly lives without social media?  Can we skillfully avoid the dangers of social media when we do use it—and if so, how? I Corinthians 6:12 reminds us that all things are lawful, but not always helpful, and the guiding principle when in doubt is to not be dominated by anything.  Contra Haugen, Facebook cannot have power over us—and especially over our inner self—if we leave it alone.  

We need to willfully choose to be better parents, monitoring our children’s technology usage, modeling self-control and safe use of social media, and protecting them from real and present dangers online.  We need to be better church-goers, habitually inviting different members into our homes for some dopamine-creating fellowship over coffee and laughter.  We need to be better friends, conscientiously setting aside margin time to serve others in-person and delight in their company.  We need to be better employees, self-disciplined enough to refuse to let our phones interfere with our productivity.

We know the dangers of social media.  We also know that God created us for real human community: that there is a way to live a fully satisfying, good life without a social media account.  Too many of us are unwilling to live that life.  That enervation of our wills is the true danger to democracy.

* I acknowledge, too, the irony of this post: it is published on the internet, spread across social media to reach our readers.  In some ways, the irony stems from the near impossibility of remedying the political dangers that social media platforms pose. We can remedy some of the problems on an individual level, but possibly not on a social level without some level of government intervention. Technology has given us a point of no return. I am thus not arguing that social media usage is always bad; but instead that individuals need to find their own ways to combat the known dangers rather than turning to government regulation. One of the first steps in that task is to be aware of the specific dangers.  Another step would be to conscientiously understand the power that real, off-line human community, and especially communion between humans and God, has for our benefit as an alternative to whatever good social media proffers us.