Pope warns against Internet 'disinformation'…
Young people are particularly prone to “the illusion” that social media will “completely satisfy them on a relational level,” the pope warned.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-warns-against-spirals-of-hatred-on-social-media-96633
Vatican City, Jan 24, 2019 / 04:26 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis warned Thursday against the increasing narcissism and “spirals of hatred” found on today’s social media networks, encouraging people to cultivate community through their internet interactions instead. In his World Day of Social Communications message, Pope Francis said that online discussion is “too often based on opposition to the other.” This creates a digital environment that nourishes “unbridled individualism which sometimes ends up fomenting spirals of hatred,” he explained. “As Christians, we all recognize ourselves as members of the one body whose head is Christ. This helps us not to see people as potential competitors, but to consider even our enemies as persons,” he said. “We no longer need an adversary in order to define ourselves” because in “the all-encompassing gaze we learn from Christ” our identity and our relationship in communion with others, he explained.
The pope also commented on data privacy and the risk posed by social networks that profit off using people’s personal information for their own benefit. Social networks “lend themselves to the manipulation of personal data, aimed at obtaining political or economic advantages, without due respect for the person and his or her rights,” he said. Pope Francis clarified that the Catholic Church sees the internet as a tool that can be used for the betterment of humanity. “Ever since the internet first became available, the Church has always sought to promote its use in the service of the encounter between persons, and of solidarity among all,” he said. The internet provides the “opportunity to share stories and experiences of beauty or suffering that are physically distant from us, in order to pray together and together seek out the good to rediscover what unites us,” he explained. “The Church herself is a network woven together by Eucharistic communion, where unity is based not on ‘likes,’ but on the truth, on the ‘Amen,’ by which each one clings to the Body of Christ, and welcomes others,” he said.