Taking Our Lives Back from Social Media is a Matter of Survival

Digital Discernment

We all know that we have surrendered our lives to social media. It has enchanted us and brainwashed us into following it without question. We have become sheep lead to the slaughter. It is our fault yet as in all of life other people have a moral and civic responsibility to care for others.

Clearly Facebook among others is putting profits above the well being of our communities and nation. But even if Congress puts more regulations on social media it will still be up to all of us to decide we DO NOT need social media to live our lives.

We must take our lives back from social media and return to living for the benefit of each other, family and community.

Sin, that leads to selfishness and then to lawlessness is accelerating in our nation. We the citizens have given ourselves over to conspiracies and we have also bought into believing lies to get our way.

It is through people like Frances Haugen's that we can perhaps with God's grace and mercy salvage our nation from the edge of ruin.

"Social media is not the problem; social media is the mask over our underlying fears. We all want new breaking-news alerts or viral tweets or a new text message, because it means, for at least one more moment, we have evaded eye contact with the Savior, evaded the seriousness of what it would mean to meet him, to hear him, and to be faced with the call of God that might disrupt our comfy lives..." from the article: Why We Should Escape Social Media (And Why We Don’t)

"The journey from disillusioned ex-employee to modern-day heroine took Frances Haugen less than five months. The 37-year-old logged out of Facebook’s company network for the last time in May and last week was being publicly lauded a “21st-century American hero” on Washington’s Capitol Hill.

That journey was paved with tens of thousands of internal documents, taken from Facebook’s internal system by Haugen, that formed the backbone of a series of damning revelations first published in the Wall Street Journal last month. They revealed that Facebook knew its products were damaging the mental health of teenage girls, resisted changes that would make the content of its main platform less divisive and knew its main platform was being used to incite ethnic violence in Ethiopia.

The ensuing public backlash tipped Facebook into its biggest crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 and culminated in damning testimony by Haugen in front of US senators last Tuesday. Her opening words were delivered against an excruciating backdrop for Facebook: only hours earlier all its services – including its eponymous platform, the Instagram photo and video sharing app and the WhatsApp messaging service – went offline for six hours due to a maintenance error that affected the company’s 2.8 billion daily users. Facebook’s services then suffered more glitches on Friday..."

From the article: Frances Haugen takes on Facebook: the making of a modern US hero