A Code of Ethics for the Chronically Online

It’s been 35 days since I logged onto social media. Apart from some minor boredom, it hasn’t been that bad. During my time away, I’ve delved into research on how the socials work and spent time reevaluating my own relationship to them. Here are some lessons I’ve learned and how I’m going to change my behavior going forward.Social media really is that bad. Virtually all the platforms I researched are designed for subscriber growth and profit over any sort of responsibility. Twitter/X is a cesspool of revenge porn and death threats. Instagram has been found legally liable in one case of teenaged suicide and accused in countless others. Facebook has been implicated in genocide in Myanmar and political violence in countries such as the Philippines and Ethiopia, to say nothing of its role in American political violence. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We’ve had whistleblower after whistleblower come forward to show that these sites prioritize user engagement over basic health and safety concerns and have a devil-may-care attitude towards election interference. As Sarah Wynn-Williams amply illustrated in Careless People, the people who run these platforms simply do not care. This is wrong. The greater one’s power, the greater one’s responsibility. These companies (and the people who lead them) need to be held accountable for their reckless pursuit of profits over the safety of their fellow human beings.I’m no longer a huge Bible quoter, but I can’t think of a more apt description for these folks than Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters...You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”Even overlooking the most extreme cases, these platforms are built on an amoral foundation which encourages polarization and vitriol over relationship building and lets people anonymously bully each other with zero accountability. All that being said, I think there’s a strong moral case to be made for disengaging from social media as much as one can. But I’ve also been thinking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s argument against moral purity, which Hanna Reichel summarizes in her great devotional book, For Such a Time is This:“…when [authority] is rotten, personal integrity is also endangered. In his posthumously published Ethics, Bonhoeffer even denounces the desire to preserve one’s moral purity as a temptation. The only way to stay innocent, he muses, would be to have no part of history.”Is leaving a platform akin to dropping out of a conversation we may have a positive influence on? By logging off, do we abdicate these platforms to the trolls and neo-Nazis? I, along with many other Liberals, quit Twitter/X after Elon Musk’s takeover, but our boycott barely registered. So I question whether simply deleting one’s account is the moral slam dunk it seems like.Furthermore, as a person whose vocation is bound up in finding readers, quitting social media doesn’t feel like a realistic option. These platforms are incredibly flawed and skewed away from content like mine, but they are still discovery engines for creatives like me.So, I plan on reengaging with social media once Lent is over. But I have come up with some new guidelines for myself and my kids around social media/screen time. NEW RULES FOR MYSELF:* Scroll mindfully. Before you open the app, name the reason you’re logging on and how you’re feeling at the moment. (Doing it aloud is a great trick for accountability!) Log on to complete a work-related post, then log