Why I Left Facebook!

 

By Dr. Ken Matto

 

Go from the presence of a foolish man, when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.  (Proverbs 14:7)

 

After being on Facebook (FB) for about ten years, I finally had to call it quits. It has become a bane in my life and I needed to remove it before it became a disease.  I will detail below the reasons for my departure from FB and believe me they are not trivial.  The problem is when a person is steeped in the FB phenomenon they will not see the reasons I am listing, I know, because I did not see them since I was blinded to the anticipation anxiety of "who posted what” so I would scour the thread to see what was new and the majority of the time it was nonsense.  Do you really need to see a picture of someone’s dinner?  Do you really need to see 10 pictures of someone’s cat?  Do you really need to see 50 pictures of someone’s baby?  Why isn’t 1 or 2 enough?  Now I am not saying that there hasn’t been some decent and informative things posted by some on FB which has triggered me to do some research into them but the majority of the posts the world can do without.  Now I would like to attend to the reasons I left FB.

 

Reclaiming about 14 hours per week

If there is one thing I can attest to is the fact that FB is time waster if you allow it to get out of hand.  I did and now that I have left FB I can truthfully state that I will now reclaim about 14 hours of time per week that I can put to better use.  I estimated I would spend about 2 hours per day searching and posting and answering.  14 hours per week comes out to 8.3% of the entire week and at that rate the yearly total is 730 hours which is 30.41 days per year.  THAT IS AN ENTIRE MONTH!  Are you willing to give an entire month each year out of your life to FB?  I was doing it and I never calculated the time loss.

 

Facebook Theologians

If there is one characteristic of FB it is loaded with FB theologians.  These are the Christians and false Christians who pretend to be knowledgeable in the Bible but never study it.  Their claim to fame is copy and pasting somebody else’s work.  Sometimes that is acceptable if the person quoted has something legitimate to say.  Most of the times people post Memes on line and think they have made their case.  Many times I have had heated discussions with these people and they always respond with trite statements that never answer your query.  Sometimes I would be challenged on a certain belief so instead of writing a very long post, I would post a link to an article on my site if I have previously broached the subject at hand.  Then within 1 minute their response comes back and I knew at that moment that they have not read the article I posted nor did they ever intend to.  Most of the FB theologians are nothing more than parrots for their pastors, prophecy books, theology books, media ministries because I rarely ever came across anyone who really studied the majority of subjects that were broached.  Most FB theologians do not want to read your responses or studies because they are waiting for you to stop typing and post so they can post.  Beware of FB theologians because the majority of them are frauds and can introduce you to false teachings and if you are not biblically astute, you may fall for them.

 

Spiritual Bullying

This has happened to me many times.  It is done by FB theologians.  I have posted articles or comments which are responded to by as many as 5 or 6 people who just keep posting and attacking.  The Bullying comes in when you are alone on a thread and multiple people are coming at you and do not give you an opportunity to respond properly to the query of one person.  By the time you post one response, there are two or three more you may not be able to respond to because they are ganging up on you.  One person cannot handle the barrage of comments made by 5 or 6 people.

 

Marketing Scams

FB is loaded with marketing scams.  Some I have seen are pictures of children in hospital beds where it says “Pray for Johnny because he has stage 4 cancer” or “Pray for Jane because she has Multiple Myeloma” or something very horrific.  These type of posts are normally posted by marketing companies to gather as many names as they can so they can post advertisements on your FB page.  You may see a picture of a sick person posted by someone you know and they personally know the person in that picture, then you know it is legitimate.  Then you have the other type of posted pictures which shows a large amount of cash and then states “send this picture to twenty people and God will bless them and you.”  So many people believe these things and send them on.  When they came to me, they were deleted.  These are marketing companies targeting you.  Did you ever notice that you search for something on Amazon and then you go to FB and there is an ad for the very same thing you just searched for?  I have seen that hundreds of times especially if you use Google as your search engine.  A good friend of mine suggested I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine and since I switched, there have been no ads following me around.

 

A Virus Conduit

Facebook is notorious for allowing viruses to hit your computer.  In January of 2019 I was following up on a posted picture and I clicked on it and it was the scam which locked up my computer.  Instead of paying the creeps on the other end the $500, I brought in a computer technician who took my system completely down and rebooted it without the virus.  It cost me $140 that day for following a lead on FB.  Beware of clicking on any posted picture because it could be the window dressing for a virus.

 

Residual Negative Feelings

There have been times when I have read a post or a response which was posted very scathingly and I dwelled upon it for many hours causing me to have very negative feelings about the post.  I would ponder in my mind a response and sometimes the response I wanted to post would be very caustic.  I am being very honest here that negative posts can affect you for many hours or even days.  I am a very upbeat person and I do not normally host evil comebacks in my mind but some of the responses and attacks I received almost made me want to respond as they did.  There were times when I had posted those types of responses but then I went back and deleted them because that was not me.

 

It’s easy to vilify someone that lives 1,000 miles away

When someone posts something a person disagrees with or just doesn’t like, they can easily vilify that person especially if they do not live in the same town but half way across the country.  We might think that we are creating a following on FB when we partake in that kind of behavior but we are actually making enemies and displeasing the Lord.  I had to unfriend some people because of that attitude, discussion is fine even with disagreements but excoriating someone is not. Cast out the scorner, and contention shall go out; yea, strife and reproach shall cease.  (Proverbs 22:10)  I would point you to my study entitled “Keyboard Christianity” which covers this subject more thoroughly.   https://www.scionofzion.com/keyboard_christianity.htm

 

Friends are not really friends unless you know them personally

The con on FB is that belief that if someone agrees with you, even in the slightest way on one point, they ask to be your friend.  The problem is how can you be friends with someone you have never met?  I had 337 friends on FB but out of that I probably only knew about 15 personally.  So basically I had 15 real friends and 322 fake friends even though they are real people.  Some have unfriended me and I have unfriended some of them so the number fluctuates but the reality is that those 15 I personally know still remain my friends even though they live in different states.  So what does that tell you?  How can a person be a true friend if it is possible to unfriend them or they unfriend you and never hear from them again?  A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.  (Proverbs 18:24)  The principle in Proverbs 18:24 is that if you are going to have friends, then you must be friendly.  How can you be friendly if you never met the person?

 

It is not really Social Media!

Another con is to get you to believe that you are actually socializing with people when you are alone while doing it.  By posting, you are just basically leaving comments on a website and just because someone responds, does not mean that you are socializing since you have no idea who that person is.  Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.  (1 Corinthians 15:33)  1 Corinthians 15:33 gives us the principle that we are to watch out with who we have social intercourse with or just casual conversation because if we are not biblically sharp, it can begin to corrupt the way we think and then the thoughts turn into actions.  The word “manners” carries with it the meaning of “habits.” This is why these types of sites are dangerous unless you personally know the person you are speaking with you have no idea who is behind that computer and they might have an agenda to go after weaker Christians to try and derail them.

 

It can be Addictive

As I previously stated above I was on at least 2 hours per day.  After every meal or my daily shower, one of the first things I did was to see how many notifications I received. Many times we see people staring at their smart phones and what they will be doing is either texting or checking their favorite media site like FB.  There is always anticipation anxiety present because we are always looking forward to the next post.  Addiction to social media can be as addictive as opioids.  If it was not addictive, then people would not be staring at their phones for hours each day.  They would be able to wait till they get home to log on.  Sometimes getting likes is like getting high because it is a rush.

 

Fake News

Many times real situations are converted into fake news with the addition of pictures with fake captions or fabricated explanations.  There is a site on FB called “The Babylon Bee” which is a site of total satire and their news is fake and they tell you that up front, yet it is believed by many as real.  For example, my cousin who lives in California sent me an email with an article entitled “California to fine churches $1,000 for every plastic communion cup they use.”  Now this article was sent to her so she forwarded on to me to see if this was real.  As soon as I saw that it was the Babylon Bee, I immediately notified her it was satire.  So one must very discerning when reading the posts on FB even if they contain pictures or else you will be believing fake news which could adversely affect you.

 

Summary

I left FB not because I was leaving my real friends but because I was leaving my fake friends.  I was tired of the foolishness and those who wanted to be teachers and yet were not even students of the Bible.  Copy and Pasting Memes is not teaching.  Christians did not care if your case was made by the Bible because it had to fit the way they think or the way their pastor thinks.  They set themselves up as the standard instead of the Bible being the standard.  If all Christians believed exactly what the Bible taught and did not impose their own ideas on it, then there would be harmony among Christians but the reality is that if the Bible interferes with the plans or thoughts of many Christians, they will reject any truth from the Scriptures just to protect their own private interpretation.  Facebook is the place where anybody who is a nobody can be a somebody of their own creation.  Beware of Facebook and its 1 billion “friends” it could be more detrimental to you than beneficial and I speak from experience not theory.

 

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