Truth isn’t as important as emotion. Reality isn’t as important as how many page views will be generated.
Every part of what’s published, from the headline to the quotes to the conclusion is intended to emotionally manipulate you in some way. The sites want you to click and they want you to share.
And social media platforms only amplify this cycle.
Facebook has explicitly said, numerous times, that what they care about most is engagement. They want you on their site as long as possible, liking things, making comments, and watching videos.
To keep you on their site, they’ve crafted their news feed algorithm so that it shows you the content that’s getting the most engagement. The most discussion. The most shares and likes and interaction.
What sort of content gets the most engagement? The kind that is emotionally manipulative. Talking about what you ate for lunch won’t generate many comments. Pontificating about a school shooting will.
We Are The Willing Victims
None of this would matter if we didn’t gladly participate in this wicked cycle. But we have been unwittingly trained by social media platforms to share things that will get a response.
If you post something and nobody comments or likes, you’re not going to post anything like that again. We are the dogs in Pavlov’s experiment.
Every time we get a like or a heart or a retweet, it feeds our sense of importance and actually causes a little shot of dopamine to be released in our brains. And so we unconsciously craft what we post so that it gets reactions.
We add inflammatory commentary. We share posts that reduce complex subjects to simple emotions like rage or cynicism or being flippant (if that’s an emotion).
Instead of taking time to wrestle Biblically with difficult subjects, we post a meme that reduces the entire thing to the lowest common denominator.
We are willingly becoming more angry, less thoughtful, less reasonable, and less truthful.
This shouldn’t be the case, especially for us who follow Christ.
We serve the One who is THE TRUTH and we are called to put away ALL falsehood.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, and patience, none of which make for good blog posts.
There are numerous Christian blogs that claim to be helping believers be more “discerning”. They write about rumors they heard about Christian leaders, all to “serve” the Christian body.
This is absolute crap.
They want page views, just like everybody else. Go look at their sites. What do you see? What do you know…ads! They’re in the game like everyone else.
We are willingly turning up the temperature on the stove, slowly boiling ourselves to death.
So What Should We Do?
So how do we respond as believers? Do we abandon social media and the internet altogether?
Not necessarily.
In Philippians 4:5, Paul says, “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.”
The internet doesn’t reward reasonableness or nuance or deep thought. It rewards memes and hit pieces and anger and humor. It favors the things that are going to get the most reactions.
We can buck this trend by obeying Philippians 4:5.
We should stop and think two, three, or four times before we post.
Before we share anything, we should ask:
Does this content demonstrate my God-given reasonableness to the world?
Am I sharing truth or a clearly emotionally manipulative piece designed to get reactions? How can you tell? Just look at what emotions you’re feeling as you consume the content.
Am I reducing a complex issue (which is most important issues) to the lowest common denominator (memes do this frequently)?
Am I encouraging the fruit of the Spirit in myself and others through what I share?
Does this content encourage Biblical reflection or knee-jerk reaction?
The internet can be a wonderful thing. When used rightly, it can be a tool to spread the glory of God.
But in order to use the internet rightly, we need to understand how it works. If we don’t, we’re prone to be manipulated and even led directly into sin.
Don’t let the internet kill you.
This article originally appeared here.
