Social Control Media, Technology & Catholicism: Synod on Synodality review and feedback
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
24 Jun 2025
The late Pope Francis asked a group of approximately four hundred bishops to work together from 2021 to 2024 on a review of how people of Catholic faith interact and advance as a movement. In formal terms, this committee of bishops was given the title Synod on Synodality. The term Synod is used widely in all Christian religions to refer to committees, boards or meetings of those groups at any level of the church heirarchy. The term Synodality is specific to the Catholic Church. The Synod has an official web page where they attempt to explain Synodality.
Various working groups were created on a wide range of topics. In this review, I am only looking at working group three, which examined the topic the mission in the digital environment. I then go on to provide some of my own evidence about the topics the working group is considering.
There is another working group that looked at the topic of polygamy. The psychology and neuroscience of social control media usurps our relationships in such a way that some people feel Facebook's algorithms are exerting as much influence as a third person in their marriage. I created a separate blog post to look at the evidence concerning the phenomena of polygamy and cyberpolygamy. Given how pervasive these technologies are becoming, it is essential reading alongside the content in this analysis.
In a recent news report unrelated to the Synod, the diocese of Paderborn (central/northern Germany) announced they will try to use TikTok to engage with youth. The scope of working group three is very broad and is not only about social control media platforms. I feel the scope covers all forms of digital technology.
Even amateur radio packet repeaters are in scope although amateur radio licensing doesn't allow the explicit transmission of religious material.
The Vatican was an early adopter of shortwave radio. Pope Leo XIV and Monsignor Lucio Adrian Ruiz, secretary of the Dicastero per la Comunicazione visited Vatican Radio's broadcasting facility this week:
Reading the outputs from both the working group and the overall Synod, I feel that the church as a whole did not decide to either embrace or reject social control media. They are acknowledging that it is part of the digital landscape and trying to decide how the church relates to it.
How the Synod process evolved at a high level
Before delving into the details, here is an overview of the process and the reports that came out at different times, with direct links to the translated editions.
The main web site for the Synod is at www.Synod.va and it is available in various languages. It appears that the content was created in Italian and translated to English and other languages. This makes it a little bit more difficult to read.
There was an extended gathering in Rome in October 2023 where an initial draft report was produced.
The bishops came back to Rome again in October 2024 and produced a final report from the Synod.
- October 2024 final report (English translation)
- October 2024 final report (Italian)
- NCR news report about the final report
The Vatican published the late Pope Francis's greeting at the conclusion of the Synod. News reports quickly appeared about the Pope's intervention.
They also published some images and videos.
Key points from the final report as it relates to the digital environment
At point 58, the report notes that Christians may be attempting to proclaim the Gospel through their participation in a digital environment.
58. ... Christians, each according to their diverse roles - within the family and other states of life; in the workplace and in their professions; engaged civilly, politically, socially or ecologically; in the development of a culture inspired by the Gospel, including the evangelisation of the digital environment - walk the paths of the world and proclaim the Gospel where they live, sustained by the gifts of the Spirit.
59. In doing so, they ask the Church not to abandon them but rather to enable them to feel that they are sent and sustained in mission.
This point appears to encourage the church to contemplate the situation faced by those under the influence of a digital environment but it does not necessarily imply the digital environment is good or bad.
At point 112, concerning mobility, which includes people from all levels of society, the report notes:
Some maintain strong bonds with their country of origin, especially with the help of digital media, and thus can find it difficult to form connections in their new country; others find themselves living without roots.
This is an excellent observation. In Europe, I've met couples who have relationships entirely dependent upon devices they use for automated machine translation. When new people arrive in town, the WhatsApp culture encourages neighbors to spend weeks or months talking behind their backs without ever looking them in the eye.
113. The spread of digital culture, particularly evident among young people, is profoundly changing their experience of space and time; it influences their daily activities, communication and interpersonal relationships, including faith. The opportunities that the internet provides are reshaping relationships, bonds and boundaries. Nowadays, we often experience loneliness and marginalisation, even though we are more connected than ever. Moreover, those with their own economic and political interests can exploit social media to spread ideologies and generate aggressive and manipulative forms of polarisation. We are not well prepared for this and ought to dedicate resources to ensure that the digital environment becomes a prophetic space for mission and proclamation. Local Churches should encourage, sustain and accompany those who are engaged in mission in the digital environment. Christian digital communities and groups, particularly young people, are also called to reflect on how they create bonds of belonging, promoting encounter and dialogue. They need to offer formation among their peers, developing a synodal way of being Church. The internet, constituted as a web of connections, offers new opportunities to better live the synodal dimension of the Church.
This paragraph acknowledges the dangers of digital technology, especially social control media and the key words are "We are not well prepared for this". Yet it suggests that local churches should "encourage" more of these online risks. I don't feel the word "encourage" is the right word to use but I don't think they should discourage either.
149. The synodal process has insistently drawn attention to some specific areas of formation of the People of God for synodality. The first of these concerns the impact of the digital environment on learning processes, concentration, the perception of self and the world, and the building of interpersonal relationships. Digital culture constitutes a crucial dimension of the Church’s witness in contemporary culture and an emerging missionary field. This requires ensuring that the Christian message is present online in reliable ways that do not ideologically distort its content. Although digital media has great potential to improve our lives, it can also cause harm and injury through bullying, misinformation, sexual exploitation and addiction. Church educational institutions must help children and adults develop critical skills to safely navigate the web.
These comments are very relevant and very consistent with my own testimony, some of which is reproduced later in this report.
150. Another area of great importance is the promotion in all ecclesial contexts of a culture of safeguarding, making communities ever safer places for minors and vulnerable persons.
When I raised this topic in the free software communities, my family was attacked ruthlessly. See the emails I sent at the end of 2017 and comments about IBM Red Hat later in this report.
Sources related to working group three, the mission in a digital environment
The Synod.va web site published as list of all the working groups. The web site includes a brief video about each group and a link to their most recent reports.
The video for working group three lasts a little bit less than two minutes. Here are some of the key quotes and my own observations:
"Today, people, especially the young, have learnt to live simultaneously and seamlessly in both digital and physical spaces."
I feel that statement is quite wrong. People have learnt how to use digital spaces. One recent research report suggests that nearly seventy percent of young people feel bad after using social media. In other words, they feel pressured into using it. Therefore, they are not living seamlessly. People are suffering.
The statements made in the video are not the statements presented in the final report. We will get to that. Nonetheless, whenever social control media is mentioned, there is a tendency for people to make these generalisations about being unable to live without it. Every time we see a statement like this, it is important to challenge it.
"How does the church use and approriate the digital culture?"
The rhetorical question is interesting. In reality, the Silicon Valley overloads use and appropriate any content that we give them. The church doesn't use them, they use us. How do you think they got so rich?
A better question might be "how does the church complement the shortcomings of digital cultures?".
Let's not forget, one of the other engineers died on our wedding day and it was Palm Sunday, the day Jesus wept as he arrived in Jerusalem.
On the page listing the working groups, they provide a link to a three page progress report from working group three. Here is an interesting quote from the late Pope Francis that was repeated by the working group:
"This environment is now “indistinguishable from the sphere of everyday life.”",
Pope Francis was a smart guy and he had some smart people around him, including the late Cardinal Pell. We can trace that quote right back to the thinking of Alan Turing. Turing is considered to be the grandfather of computer science and a martyr. Turing gave us exactly the same concept in the legendary Turing test, which Turing himself called the imitation game in 1949.
Another way to interpret this phenomena is to say that the masses have been brainwashed by the Silicon Valley overlords.
When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gave us the low down in her testimony to Congress:
The choices being made by Facebook’s leadership are a huge problem — for children, for public safety, for democracy — that is why I came forward. And let’s be clear: it doesn’t have to be this way. We are here today because of deliberate choices Facebook has made.
The summary from the working group goes on...
"To proclaim the Gospel effectively in our contemporary culture, we must discern the opportunities and challenges presented by this new dimension of the “place”"
That particular quote acknowledges that there are both opportunities and challenges. The jubilee year is all about hope and I really hope the working group members are reading the stuff from whistleblowers, child psychologists and even coroners who are warning us about the impact of Facebook and their ilk.
Nonetheless, the report includes the phrase "greater immersion" and I feel the church should not assume "greater immersion" is a default course of action.
The summary also touches on the concept of jurisdiction. The Catholic Church has traditionally organized itself on a geographical basis. The Internet allows people to connect and form virtual communities without any geographical connection.
On a sidenote, in the days before the Internet, the church was able to move high-risk priests from a parish on one side of the city to the other side of the city and not worry about anybody joining the dots. I went through the papers from Australia's Royal Commission meticulously and found this note from the legendary Father X___:
That means that if anyone in Australia, learning that Father Z___ had treatment because of something that happened in Boston and going there to find out, would run into a dead end.
The letter in question was penned just before the Internet came onto public consciousness. Looking at those words today, it is a stark reminder about how the Internet is tipping life on its head.
The working group goes on to comment that they are seeking "practical recommendations or proposals" from across the community, on any topic related to the Church's mission in the digital environment.
People engaged in the free software movement, whether they are Catholic or not, can contact their local diocese to find out who is locally coordinating the response to these challenges.
Another phrase that caught my eye:
"today we live in a digital culture"
Not exactly. Some people would say that a digital culture is being imposed on us. Institutions like politics and the media are hooked on it and they put it up on a pedestal. Therefore, it is even more vital that other institutions, such as the church, take the role of questioning everything about digital culture and also maintaining viable alternatives.
Life without mobile phones, life without apps
Mobile phones and apps are closely related. There are some people who choose to live without a smart phone, in other words, they only have half the problems of a full mobile phone. Some people also choose to have smart phones without the Google or Apple app store, for example, people who install the Replicant or LineageOS and use the F-Droid app store to limit their phone to ethical apps.
In practical terms, there are people who are unable to navigate their home town without using their phone. An interesting question arises for the church, what proportion of followers are unable to identify the most direct route from their home to their closest church without looking at an app? It would be interesting to analyze the responses based on various factors such as age and years of residence in the parish.
Another key question, closely related to the above, is how many parishioners can recall regular mass times and key events in the parish calendar without looking at their phone? It is great to have this information visible on the parish web site, nonetheless, when people are truly engaged in the parish and the community, this information will be committed to memory. The more pervasive this information is in a community, the more resilient the community.
Authentication systems undermining human dignity
Today we frequently see companies insisting they need to have our mobile phone numbers to "authenticate" us or to "sign" documents by text message.
This type of thing is particularly creepy. Many people are familiar with the Nazi-era practice of burning identification numbers into the skin of Jewish prisoners. Mobile phone numbers serve a similar functional purpose. Even though the numbers are not physically burnt into our skin, it is often inconvenient for people to change their number.
There are many closely related phenomena, including web sites demanding users authenticate themselves from a Gmail or Facebook account.
At the level of the church, the state, education, health care and financial services, it is vital to ensure everybody can participate in the way they want to without giving up their dignity.
The church needs to become just as vocal about these topics as it is about themes such as abortion.
Need to emphasize consent
Concerns about consent and coercion have become a big topic in the world today. Ironically, the social control media platforms pretending to help give women a platform are violating the principle of consent in so many other ways.
Consider, for example, people who spent time creating a profile on Facebook or Twitter, sometimes over many years, connecting with hundreds or thousands of followers and then being confronted with the demand to add their mobile phone number to their account. If they don't add their mobile phone number, their account is blocked. There is no genuine technical reason to have a mobile phone number in the account as many of these services worked exactly the same way for many years before such demands became commonplace.
People are not freely consenting to share their phone numbers with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The services have been bastardized to ambush their users with these demands.
Significantly, this culture of ambushing and coercing people trickles down into society. In Australia, Chanel Contos started a highly publicized petition/journal with stories from women at elite private schools who felt they had been ambushed, bullied and coerced into unwanted physical encounters.
Ironically, Miss Contos publicized her concerns through the very same platforms that are undermining our understanding of consent and privacy.
The church itself has had to do a lot of soul searching on topics of consent and abuses of power. This puts the church in an interesting position where we can say that even considering some of the most shocking revelations about abuse, those responsible are the lesser evil compared to the overlords in Silicon Valley.
It is remarkable how quickly the institutions of Silicon Valley have abandoned all checks and balances and seen fit to do as they please. The Catholic Church and other religious institutions can now take what they have learnt from the critical analysis of their own mistakes and warn society how stupid it would be to go down the same path again with these digital gangsters.
Digital technology is much more than social control media
The church is not new to technology. Early printing presses were installed in church premises. Caxton installed England's first press at Westminster Abbey. Other sites included Oxford and St Alban's Abbey. Prior to the printing press, reading and writing were activities reserved for clerics and many of their works only existed in Latin. The printing press enabled the mass production of bibles in German and English languages. This, in turn, had a huge impact on the standardization of the language just as it helped standardize the moral attitudes that Silicon Valley is ripping out underneath us. The King James Version of the bible is widely recognized for its impact on the English language.
The standardization of language was only one side-effect of this invention. The reformation was another. As people gained books and the power of reading, they became less dependant upon the clerics.
Likewise, social control media today is having an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Just as printing presses enabled the reformation, social control media may lead to further changes in the way humans organize ourselves around religious structures and beliefs. The overlords in Silicon Valley are actively contemplating these roles for themselves. Elon Musk has even dressed up as Satan. If the Catholic Church doesn't offer a compelling alternative to these power shifts then it will be taken out of the church's hands.
Frances Haugen (Facebook whistleblower): almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook. The company’s leadership keeps vital information from the public, the U.S. government, its shareholders, and governments around the world. The documents I have provided prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled us about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, its role in spreading hateful and polarizing messages, and so much more.
Whereas previous generations went to clerics for advice, followed by reading the bible themselves, the youth today go to a search engine and tomorrow people may be putting their faith in artificial intelligence. We can already see evidence of search engines, social control media and AI bots guiding people to increased levels of conflict with their neighbors or putting people on dark paths of isolation, self-harm and suicide.
Catholic Church resources relevant to digital environment
Catholic Church has a big role in education and schools, therefore, the church can see the impact of social control media and the church can enforce bans for children and provide training to staff and parents.
Teachers, as employees of the church or the state, have reported a rise in bullying from parents who group together on messaging apps. In one recent case, British police sent six officers to humiliate a parent who had used WhatsApp to agitate about the local school. The conflict, the adversarial nature of this environment and the huge waste of police resources are all consequences of the way the technology is designed and used in society. Each incident like this provides an insight about opportunities for the Catholic Church to ask "is there a better way?".
Words from Frances Haugen help explain the six police officers laying seige to the parents of small children:
I saw that Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world.
The Catholic Church is a large employer in many countries. This gives the church the ability to make decisions about the use of mobile phones and messaging apps in the employer/employee relationship. An employer can't prohibit staff from using these things in their personal time but they can decide to eliminate any official use of these gimmicks for work purposes. The employer/employee relationship provides another opportunity to provide training about the importance of human dignity above the demands of our devices.
The public agenda in the digital environment, abortion of our species
With many politicians and journalists now living their lives through social control media, their ability to evaluate which issues are worthy of public debate are heavily influenced by the issues that are supposedly trending online. There is a notion that issues are trending online as a consequence of public interest while the reality is the managers of online platforms exert influence to ensure some issues appear to grow organically while significant but inconvenient topics are conveniently buried in the flood of news.
In this context, the Catholic Church provides an alternative route to put issues on the agenda for public discussion, regardless of whether a particular issue appears to be "trending" or not. This power is most often used for issues close to the church's teaching, such as lobbying about abortion, but there is no reason the church can't use the same resources to lobby against the abortion of the human race by AI.
Aid for victims of discrimination by Silicon Valley overlords and online mobs
The Catholic Church traces its origins to the persecution of Jesus and the martyrs Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
"But let us pass from ancient examples, and come unto those who have in the times nearest to us, wrestled for the faith. Let us take the noble examples of our own generation. Through jealousy and envy the greatest and most just pillars of the Church were persecuted, and came even unto death. Let us place before our eyes the good Apostles. Peter, through unjust envy, endured not one or two but many labours, and at last, having delivered his testimony, departed unto the place of glory due to him. Through envy Paul, too, showed by example the prize that is given to patience: seven times was he cast into chains; he was banished; he was stoned; having become a herald, both in the East and in the West, he obtained the noble renown due to his faith; and having preached righteousness to the whole world, and having come to the extremity of the West, and having borne witness before rulers, he departed at length out of the world, and went to the holy place, having become the greatest example of patience." (first epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, 5:1 - 5:7)
These words account for the persecution of Peter and Paul under the Emperor Nero almost two thousand years ago.
Eight hundred years ago, the Magna Carta arrived and over time, it is has inspired the US Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the abolition of capital punishment.
Yet today we see the Silicon Valley overlords wish to throw all of that out the window and take us back to the time of Nero.
Consider article 27 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
- Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
- Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
When we look at the web sites of well known free software projects like Debian and Fedora, we see them openly proclaiming their desire to censor certain people. Anybody who speaks up about ethical issues in our industry has been subject to these extreme reprisals from time to time.
Linus Torvals (founder of Linux) was banned from DebConf. Dr Jacob Appelbaum was subject to falsified rumors of sexual misconduct. Dr Richard Stallman was subject to a crucifixion by online petition at Easter 2021. A rival professor, Gunnar Wolf, made the call for a vote on the night of Holy Thursday, the very day that Judas betrayed Jesus. When I spoke up to defend Dr Stallman's civil liberties, the same mob simply turned on me too.
Dr Peter Eckersley and I were classmates at the University of Melbourne. Dr Eckersley was the Chief Computer Scientist of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and subsequently director of research at the Partnership on AI. After Dr Eckersley's death, I restored his blog posts about military use of AI and the EFF itself censored links to these blogs, giving rise to a new civil rights law suit where the EFF and Google are rather bizarrely sitting together in the dock as defendants.
The similarities between these cases and the growing list of victims is clear proof that they are not random. There is a coordinated effort to roll back or circumvent civil rights. If a digital space or digital world does exist, then it is eerily similar to the world where Roman Emperors used grisly executions to perpetuate control through fear.
The Catholic Church can seek out the victims who have been canceled, victims who have been de-platformed and people who have something to say about human dignity in the era of AI. Whether or not these people are Catholics or not, the concerns that independent experts have been trying to research and publicize need to be elevated above the noise from public relations departments.
At the same time, the horrific impact inflicted on our families is often hidden from public view.
Children in the digital environment
It is telling that we found very similar tactics used by Harvey Weinstein and Chris Lamb, former leader of the Debian Project.
This is significant because Lamb was trained through the Google Summer of Code and funded by Google, including a large payment of $300,000 shortly before three victims revealed the scandal. Despite Debian's promise of transparency, the money was only revealed more than six months later and Google's name is never publicly connected to the numbers.
When Weinstein had concerns about the behavior of some women, he would send nasty rumors about "behavior" to other people in the industry. There's something snobby about these attitudes to human behavior.
When women made complaints to the police, the film director Peter Jackson spoke up and confirmed Weinstein had been using these dirty tricks, spreading rumors about behavior of women who were not submissive enough for his liking.
"I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs. This was probably in 1998," Jackson said.
"At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us - but in hindsight, I realise that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing."
A range of people have come forward showing that Chris Lamb was doing exactly the same thing in his role at Debian. Under copyright law, co-authors do not have any obligation to the person elected to serve as Debian Project Leader from time to time. We are all equals.
Subject: Re: Debian Developer status Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:36:09 +0900 From: Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
Hi Daniel,
even if, going through a lawsuite like this in the UK is out and above my abilities and financial possibilities. But I am scared that Lamb actually also hosed an application for a company in NY, a job related to Debian. If that has happened, and I can reasonably document it, I would consider a defamation law suite.
> Lamb is a resident of the UK and sending emails from the UK > https://regainyourname.com/news/cyberbullying-cyberstalking-and-online-harassment-a-uk-study/
Thanks for the links, I will keep them in mind.
Norbert
-- PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Developer GPG: 0x860CDC13 fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
Even more disturbing, Lamb started his attacks on my family at the very same time that Cardinal George Pell was convicted in 2018. My second cousin had been a member of Cardinal George Pell's former choir in Melbourne. Lamb and his co-conspirators, funded by Google, started anonymous rumors about abuse.
Multiple people came forward with evidence that Lamb was behaving like Weinstein, spreading the rumors behind our backs. When Dr Preining and I spoke up, a third victim saw the scandal and identified himself publicly on Christmas Day:
Subject: Re: Censorship in Debian Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2018 23:44:38 +0100 From: martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> Organization: The Debian project To: debian-project@lists.debian.org
Hello project,
It's very sad to read about what's going on.
I know that there's been at least another case, in which DAM and AH have acted outside their mandate, threatening with project expulsion, and choosing very selectively with whom they communicate. I know, because I was being targeted.
Neither DAM nor AH (the same people still active today) made a single attempt to hear me. None of my e-mails to either DAM or AH were ever answered.
Instead, DAM ruled a verdict, and influenced other people to the point that "because DAM ruled" was given as a reason for other measures. This was an unconstitutional abuse of DAM's powers, and in the case of AH, the whole mess also bordered on libel. Among others, the current DPL Chris Lamb promised a review in due time, but nothing ever happened.
... [ snip ] ...
Yet if it is not safe for the engineers who make this technology, it is certainly not safe for kids.
On 5 October 2021, I raised the concerns about children in this culture with the report Google, FSFE & Child Labor.
Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM since 2019, started legal action to censor and discredit my concerns. They accused me of bad faith for publishing that article. Yet the legal panel ruled that Red Hat was harassing me and engaged in an abuse of the the administrative procedure.
The irony, of course, is that the Cardinals wear red hats, like the name of the company Red Hat who were found to be abusing me. Chris Lamb at Debian had started the rumors about my family when Cardinal Pell was convicted.
The manner in which this intersected our lives and our faith, the abuse rumors after the late Cardinal Pell's conviction, my visit to the Carabinieri on the day the Cardinal died, the wedding day, on Palm Sunday, being a copy-cat (unconfirmed) suicide, the crucifixion of Dr Stallman at Easter and the Debian Christmas lynchings, it is staggering. As they say in crime movies, follow the money.
Digital environment subjects parishioners to third-party surveillance
The Catholic Church was born out of persecution and it has to be remembered that surveillance is a cornerstone of persecution.
The fact that the largest services, like Google, Facebook and Twitter are all ostensibly free is proof that they gain all of their profit from their ability to conduct effective surveillance and manipulation of the population.
At one time, the church used to fulfil similar roles. Followers would submit themselves to a form of surveillance through the sacrament of confession, where they would receive counsel from their priest. Priests seek to exert some influence from the pulpet, with the threat of ex-communication and from time to time, the odd inquisition or persecution of somebody who was ahead of his time like Galileo.
If tech companies can approximate all these functions so effectively with algorithms, we run the risk that religion becomes redundant.
Therefore, attempting to perform the church's role through a medium that is substituting itself for the role of religion is a lot like digging one's own grave.
Through a series of public inquiries and whistleblowers, we've heard the extent to which these overlords are stripping away our dignity. Their goal is to anticipate our every decision, influence who we talk to, influence how we vote and influence every last cent in our budget.
If every one of those decisions is controlled and even micromanaged for us, with scientific precision, right down to the last cent in our bank account each month, by the influence of algorithms, what space is left in our consciousness for the influence of the Gospel?
Mission: remaining relevant
Therefore, the question assigned to the working group about the mission in the digital environment could be rephrased as how does religion, of any nature, remain relevant at all?
For many families in affluent cultures today, the church is engaged out of tradition for weddings, funerals and sometimes education for the children.
For the church to empower parishioners with technology, rather than losing parishioners to technology, we need to ask questions about some of the topics raised by the free software movement.
How to ensure each person has full control over their devices, including right to repair and right to change the operating system.
Develop strategies to protect people from the risks of technology. For example, social control media allows small but very noisy groups to do intense harm to their victims with the deliberate and repeated spread of gossip and defamation. It is becoming harder and harder to ensure that no person or minority is excluded by online vendettas. How to provide support to people targetted by these toxic people? How to ensure that every person and group can take their turn to speak?
Mission: protecting society from the same mistakes
Australia went through the process of having a Royal Commission into abuses by a wide range of institutions, including the church. Yet that was too late for many of the people who have either died or lost their family members, health and careers. Wouldn't it be great to make such strong interventions before rather than after catastrophic failures have occurred? It is high time for the same level of scrutiny on social control media bosses and the exploitation and manipulation of the public on multiple levels.
Conclusion
Social control media is rapidly becoming a front for artificial intelligence. As the Turing test (imitation game) has suggested to us since 1949, it is inevitable that each new iteration of this phenomena will become more and more indistinguishable from reality. As such, it may present itself not only as a substitute for fellow human beings but as an alternative to the church. People may be duped into accepting it as their God. In other words, social control media may make the church irrelevant and after it does that, it may go on to make humanity irrelevant.
Just look at the way people make faces at me after my father died. The rudeness I experience on an almost daily basis started at a time of grief. People are brainwashed to set aside even the most basic respect for human dignity, the respect for a family at a time of grief and it just becomes another opportunity to use each other for sport. This aspect of my life was entirely created by social control media and the people who are defining that space in my own profession.
In her testimony to Congress, Frances Haugen told us:
I believe what I did was right and necessary for the common good — but I know Facebook has infinite resources, which it could use to destroy me.
In 2018, I attended the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva, making some brief comments about Facebook and Twitter falling into the wrong hands. The UN Forum occurred at the same time the jury was considering the charges against Cardinal George Pell. Pell was convicted and these social control media platforms filled up with rumors about my family and I, the very phenomena Haugen herself seems to be afraid of.
In 2022, we can see that Software in the Public Interest, Inc spent over $120,000 on legal fees attacking my family and I.
Here is that video with the comments I made at the UN Forum. I spoke for barely forty three seconds and they spent $120,000 to attack my family.
The Catholic Church teaches us that God forgives. Artificial Intelligence doesn't. █