The Bleak Feed

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the church season we are currently in: Lent. In that post I talked about how when it comes to understanding Lent correctly, we need to think of this season as a time all about orienting ourselves toward God. Sometimes doing this involves giving things up or scaling them back, but the goal is to aim our lives at the Lord.

For me this year, that does mean scaling something back significantly:  Facebook. Let me explain why.

Facebook, and all social media companies that are free to sign up for, make their money through advertising. This means that like TV, radio and print, they make more money the longer you stay on their platform. Their approach to doing this is also the same as the approach TV, radio and print take to address this same concern. They modify the content seen on their platform in order to be more engaging. But here is where Facebook and other online social media platforms differ from these other forms of legacy media. TV, radio and print only know so much about their viewers. What their likes and dislikes are, what their habits are, what their beliefs and political leanings are. They know something about what their viewers are about, for sure, but mostly their knowledge about who they are selling ads to doesn’t go further than regional analyses and testing groups.

Facebook, on the other hand, knows you personally. Let’s say you like puppies. Cute, cuddly, huggable; they are very easy to like.  Now let’s see how that translates into a day on Facebook. You happen to notice there is a page for the local Kennel that posts cute puppy pics every morning. You hit like. You then upload a picture of your own puppy, with the caption, “my little princess.” Then as you scroll through your feed you notice a friend of yours posted a picture of their puppy, and so you linger on that post, before scrolling on. These are all perfectly normal things to do. Puppies are awesome! But wouldn’t you know it, when you log onto Facebook the next day, you find that your entire Facebook feed is packed to the brim of all the puppy pictures your friends have posted over the last month, and all the ads you are being shown seem to be for de-worming medication. “Great,” you think to yourself, “now I have so much more to see.”

Everything you do on Facebook, and I do mean everything, is combed over by the company’s AI, then run through their algorithm to tailor your feed to keep you on their site longer so that they can serve you more ads. Every post you share. Every page you like. Every time you linger a bit longer than normal on a post and every time you write someone in Messenger as well, that is noticed.

And while this in itself may seem a little sinister and “Big Brother-y” to many, it isn’t actually what is causing me to need to scale back on Facebook this Lenten season.

Imagine I leave ten posts on your wall. Nine of them are all positive, and the tenth is straight up slanderous. Which post would you engage with the longest? Imagine now that I post ten things on my own wall. Nine of them are all about how my life is going, and the tenth is a political opinion that squarely disagrees with your views for a reason that you think is dumb and not thought through. Which of those posts would you engage with the longest? Now think of how those engagement will change what you see on your Facebook feed. Because remember, Facebook wants to keep you scrolling, and from your actions it knows this kind of content keeps your eyes glued.

Have you ever wondered why your Facebook feed seems to be filled with people constantly arguing and saying negative things that horrify you? This is why. Have you ever wondered why your Facebook feed has become absolutely saturated with partisan and polarizing politics? In large part, this is why.  Have you ever wondered why someone you love in real life is just an absolute troll online? This is largely why. Have you ever wondered why the world seems so hopeless and against you on your feed, but when you take a break and put your phone down, things soon don’t seem quite so bad? This is again why.

Social media platforms keep you engaged longer by making the world seem worse than it is and by making your friends seem more one-dimensional than they actually are. It isn’t that these companies are doing this for some sinister reason, but instead, simply, they are in the ad business and the more engaged you are the more ads you see. So they just give you more of what has engaged you in the past. And sadly for all of us, little is more engaging than hate, outrage and anger.

But this runs headlong into what scripture tells us about how we should think of creation and those in it in a number of ways, doesn’t it? Are we not called to be united with our brothers and sisters in Christ (Gal 3:28)? Now I ask you, how does that line up with an online platform that keeps you scrolling longer the angrier you are with your friends? In the Bible are we not also told that the world God made He said was Good (Gen 1:31); and as such was worth fighting for, was worth building his Kingdom in and is worth striving to fix up? Now I ask you again, how does this jive with an online platform that benefits directly the more of a write-off I think creation is because that is the kind of thing that keeps my eyes glued?

And so, for this Lenten season, to the best of my ability I am scaling back my time on Facebook. My wall may see the occasional update, business and organization pages and groups may be visited, Messenger will likely be used.  But the Facebook feed, where I spend 90% of my time?  That I will be trying my best to do without. I am doing this, because with how Facebook works now, I honestly think it is the single biggest actor in my life causing me to see the world as hopeless, and the people in it as write-offs. I honestly believe it is the single biggest stressor on my relationship with God.

This Lenten season, I would encourage you to take a look at your own relationship with social media. How does your time on it make you see things? How does your time on it impact your relationship with God? Because make no mistake, it does impact you. Its success as a business depends on that, and currently, social media companies are some of the most successful companies in the world. So evaluate this part of your life. Do that, and I am betting that, like me, you will find it easier to reorient yourself toward God.