Big Tech

By: American Decency Staff

There are so many big-tech stories flying around, it’s impossible to just cover one.

Netflix threatening to boycott Georgia because of pro-life legislation; Youtube demonetizing conservative video channels; Pinterest banning pro-life websites;  Ravelry (a KNITTING website) banning pro-Trump content in its’ comment section; Google skewing search results in favor of radical leftist ideals and allegedly purposefully trying to prevent another 2016 election “incident;” an Australian rugby player fired from his team for sharing a Bible verse on Instagram and then having the GoFundMe page setup for his legal defense shut down because they claimed it was “homophobic.”

Those are just examples from the past couple of months, and they are the tip of the iceberg. Let’s take a look at this trend and where it could lead.

This is what Christians and conservatives who subscribe to Biblical morality need to come to grips with: the people who run the internet don’t like you.

You are intolerable, your opinions are intolerable, and you shouldn’t be allowed to share your opinions publically. Some would go so far as to say that when you do share your intolerable opinions, they should be treated like an act of physical violence because of the psychological damage inflicted when people screaming towards insanity smack into the wall of Biblical Truth.

Their problem for them is, they need your eyes to see the advertisements on their web pages so that they can continue to sell ad-space and get paid. They hope that after enough time spent on their platform you can be re-educated into an acceptable human being.

Because they need your eyes on their web site, they track every single action that you take on the internet. They know everything about you, because that’s how they effectively sell advertisement opportunities.

Incredible as it seems, all of this is a blessing in one way: it's private companies that own that data, and it’s been collected for advertising purposes. Imagine, if you will, a government – equally hostile to your core beliefs – in control of all of that information. Think of all of the internet servers where information about you is stored, even if you don’t use the internet much: your medical records, your bank records, if you carry a smart phone: your daily route, if you use a Fitbit: what times of the day your heart rate spikes, if you use Netflix, what do you find entertaining? and we’ve already talked about the information that Facebook and Google collect when you use them. All of that data is stored on the servers of private companies who glean what marketing information they can from it in accordance with the Terms of Use we all sign without reading, but they don’t usually share it with government agencies that we know of, at least without a warrant.

Imagine a world where the government knows each citizen intimately and adopts Facebook or Google’s community standards, but prosecutes their definition of “hate speech” rather than just banning it.

That’s where China is right now. To quote the BBC, “Over the past four years, Xinjiang has been the target of some of the most restrictive and comprehensive security measures ever deployed by a state against its own people.

”These include the large-scale use of technology – facial recognition cameras, monitoring devices that read the content of mobile phones and the mass collection of biometric data.”

Xianjang is a Muslim region in the far reaches of China, and right now, there are thousands of Muslims in Chinese “re-education schools,” not for what they’ve done, but for what they’ve thought.

A 2018 article from the UK notes that China has also sent Christians to its re-education camps, “One Christian, speaking anonymously over fears of persecution, told Open Doors: ‘Even your smartphone is checked. I feel like I live in a big prison.’"

So, we can be thankful we don’t live in China and we ought to pray for its citizens. And we can be thankful that Facebook and Google are not simply America’s Huawei.

But can we rest in the fact that tech giants aren’t simply an arm of the government here? What I mean is, can we plan on that continuing to be true if, for example, the next US president passes the Equality Act? Is it imaginable that Facebook would reveal all of us who, say, rallied against homosexual marriage to the government making real marriage proponents virtually unhirable?

Here’s your answerfrom Reuters: “ In a world first, Facebook has agreed to hand over the identification data of French users suspected of hate speech on its platform to judges, France’s minister for digital affairs Cedric O said on Tuesday.”

We talked at the beginning of this article about what constitutes hate speech to these companies.

If you want it straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s how Google defined hate speech in response to questioning by Congressman Dan Crenshaw: “Hate speech again, as updated in our guidelines now extends to superiority over protected groups to justify discrimination, violence, and so on based on a number of defining characteristics whether that's race, sexual orientation, veteran status…”

Even if you have as hard of a time deciphering that verbal spaghetti as I do, here are the scariest words in the scariest clause, “as updatedin our guidelines now extends.”

It’s a fluid, changing definition that will almost definitely be far broader in ten years than it is now, just as it’s broader now than it was at Facebook’s inception.

Christians have a fixed standard: our moral code is the Word of God and it doesn’t change because of popular opinion. The world’s moral code is based completely on how the culture feels at a given time, and the call of God’s law to repentance doesn’t make them feel very good. If we hold to God’s standard we can expect rejection and ostracization and pressure to conform.

I realize this is a pretty gloomy conclusion, but it’s easier to withstand pressure if we expect it and brace ourselves. And there are some bright spots! The first, as always, is that we know that someday every knee will bow before our King and all of this nonsense will be over.  Another is that, generally speaking, the less time people spend online and particularly on social media, the happier they are. Lastly, God tells us there is joy in suffering for His name’s sake and we find real peace is in Him, not in worldly approval.

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