The unimaginable truth behind Facebook's threat to society that you need to know NOW

What's Facebook's Problem?: Facebook bans Catholic.org and Catholic clergymen

Teenage internet sensation Essena O'Neill decided to leave social media behind after realizing it did nothing but make her dependent on anonymous "likes" and "shares." Her dependency on social media is just one of many. What else does social media cause?

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Eighteen-year-old O'Neill had half a million followers on Instagram and over 250,000 YouTube subscribers. She was able to support herself via sponsorship and modeling offers and was living the life -or so it seemed.

She wrote in her blog that she was addicted to what others thought of her and couldn't be happy without social media approval. That was when she decided to change. After deleting thousands of images, she began re-captioning the few that remained with the truth behind each photo. Her honest captions, including a confession of over-exercising and under-eating, have gone viral and she thanked those who accepted her decision in a tear-filled video.

On her new blog, Lets be game changers, O'Neill wrote, "There is nothing cool about spending all your time taking edited pictures of yourself to prove to the world 'you are enough'. Don't let the numbers define you. Don't let anyone tell you you're not enough..."

Fortunately, O'Neill discovered her dependency at a young age and has taken steps to do some soul-searching. Unfortunately, many continue to fall into the social media black hole.

Though social media is a wonderful way to keep in touch with friends and family, is useful for company and business self-promotion and can instantaneously spread news around the world, there are many social pitfalls. Debate.org posed the question "Does social networking affect people's lives?" 91 percent of voters said yes while a paltry nine percent claimed no, it doesn't affect people's lives.

When you use a search engine to see how social media affects society, several article titles like "How does social media use influence political participation and civic engagement?" and "The Negative Effect of Social Media on Society and Individuals" pop up. 

A perfect example of how much control social media has over our lives is Facebook. Everyone loves Facebook because it is easy to use, is compatible with other apps such as Instagram, has games, can be used for marketing purposes, and hundreds of other reasons. Facebook, as well as several apps, has access to your private and personal information, who you're friends with, which way you lean politically, knows what your hobbies and favorite foods are and stores all the information in a carefully censored website available to the rest of the world.

It is a corporation that has the power to promote or wipe out entire online communities from its servers, which is exactly what it did to us.

Catholic.org brought uncensored news and spread the Word of God on its Facebook page which had 1.3 million likes and had a reach of approximately 20 million people around the world, but someone "hacked" us. Whoever did it made no changes to the page, but no new content was published, despite our homepage and YouTube channel's continuation. 

Whoever hacked us locked us out so we turned to Facebook operators for help. That resulted in an indefinite ban and claims we were spammers. No matter how many times Catholic Online reached out to Facebook, we were met with a wall but it got us thinking -Is Facebook doing this on purpose to close off our demographic from receiving the truth?

The Washington Post reported a similar incident happened this August to Monsignor Charles Pope, who was locked out of his Facebook account "because his clerical title was listed as part of his name..." Pope is not only a prominent D.C. Catholic priest, he is also a national columnist who went public.

When Pope went public with Facebook's decision to lock him out, several other Catholic clergymen admitted the same has happened to them in the past year. Pope is a columnist with the National Catholic Register and his column led Rev. Michael Paris, a chaplain at the University of Maryland, and Reverend Raymond Harris, a Baltimore priest who has an active online ministry, to come forward with problems concerning their clerical titles. 

Rev. Raymond Harris said, "Facebook doesn't understand or chooses not to listen that for Catholic priests or sisters, we understand 'father' or 'sister' is not a title like a career choice. It's a way of life, it's integral to who we are. I've been known this way for 21 years. Facebook differs on that and that's the religious issue."

Though Facebook's policy bans "titles of any kind" from being added to your name on your personal page, experts on technology and culture claim social platforms are still debating and struggling with balancing respect for diversity as well as privacy and decency.

Though there is currently no hard evidence Catholics, or religious people in general, are being targeted and banned from posting to Facebook, it is interesting that a legitimate company has been banned and Facebook refuses to acknowledge it has done anything wrong. O'Neill's revelation about social media and its detrimental effects on society aren't so far-fetched. Perhaps now is the time to unplug? 

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