My blog post on Come Follow Me – the Crucifixion

https://joelsmonastery.blogspot.com/2019/06/come-follow-me-matthew-27-mark-15-luke.html

Elder Oaks spoke to students at BYU Hawaii just a few days ago. You can read the entire text here. The title of his talk was “Anxiety in Stressful Times.” He analyzed some of the reasons for anxiety among young people today.

I would like to excerpt some key takeaways from Elder Oaks’ talk, because there seems to be a lot of confusion these days about a variety of important moral issues. Some people even claim the Church is backing away from its traditional positions on morality. As you will see, nothing could be farther from the truth:

We live in stressful times.  For some young people the stresses are financial:  loss of employment or home or financial security.  For others, the stresses are associated with painful separations from those we love, such as caused by divorce of parents or other threats to personal security.  We also have the challenge of living in a godless and increasingly amoral generation.  More and more publicized voices deny or doubt the existence of God.  More and more support the idea that all authority and all rules of behavior are man-made and can be accepted or rejected as one chooses, each person being free to decide for himself or herself what is right and wrong.
        Along with these challenges—and caused by them—we are confronted by a culture of evil and personal wickedness in the world.  This includes:
        Ÿ    Dishonesty
        Ÿ    Pornography
        Ÿ    Perversions
        Ÿ    The diminishing of marriage and childbearing
        Ÿ    The increasing frequency and power of the culture and phenomenon of lesbian, gay, and transgender lifestyles and values
        Ÿ    Finally, you live in a culture that focuses on individual rights and desires rather than the responsibilities and cooperative efforts that have built our societies.
        A major cause of these cultural deteriorations is the loss of belief in absolutes.  A century ago, private and public morality—the sense of moderation and restraint necessary to the survival of a free society—were universally understood to rest on the reality of absolute right and wrong, decreed by God and ultimately enforced in a final judgment.  Then, as this faith was undercut, public morality sagged into the safety net of ethics, a set of rules based on philosophy, pragmatism, or legalities, which rely on enforcement by individual self-interest or imperfect bureaucracies.[4]
        Removed from their foundation of an absolute right and wrong, ethics and legalities have been unable to hold back the tide of immoral conduct that now threatens to engulf us.  People have cast off conventional morality and old-fashioned restraints.  Our society is now in peril from increasing dishonesty, frightening increases in personal violence and other crimes, and shocking increases in public dependency attributable to deterioration in the solidarity of the family.[5]
        That is why we encourage you to look forward to marriage and not be afraid of it.  Fear is a substantial deterrent among the increasing proportion of youth being raised in broken homes, who have observed the pain broken marriages can bring.  Those kinds of fears are understandable, but they can be overcome by our faith in God and His plan, and the atonement of His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ.  That is my message to you.  Don’t lose your perspective of eternal life and the priority it assigns to marriage and child-rearing.[6]

Elder Oaks’ message is right in line with the messages from modern-day prophets since the 19th century. Don’t accept the propaganda from opponents of the Church. Our challenge is to follow the prophets even when their message may seem at odds with what the rest of society believes. Elder Oaks makes the course clear in this talk.

Over the weekend, Rameumpton wrote a post urging for government action to break up social media “monopolies” like Facebook, Google and Twitter. He is not alone in calling for such action. Facebook is portrayed as a behemoth that has to be taken down for the good of society. But this argument is both historically and philosophically misguided. I want to respond to and elaborate on three points:

• Facebook is not a monopoly

First of all, it is worth discussing what exactly makes a monopoly a monopoly. There are (at least) two competing definitions of what kind of concentration of power justifies government intervention. One view sees big as bad and aims to break up companies that have too large of a market share. This was the dominant anti-trust paradox until the late 1970s. The other approach which has been dominant since Robert Bork published his seminal work, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978 is that a big is only bad if it harms consumers by producing anti-competitive results.    

This matters immensely when talking about companies like Facebook. Sure, Facebook has a large market share and ubiquitous presence. But unless there is meaningful evidence that it has engaged in anti-competitive behavior that is harmful to consumers, then there is no anti-trust injury and no reason for government intervention.

Previous monopolies have erected barriers that have made it difficult or nearly impossible for free and fair competition. For instance, AT&T had an actual government regulatory monopoly which made it practically impossible for competitors to erect the infrastructure needed to compete. Because it bought into a faulty theory of scarcity, the government handed AT&T exclusive power and regulated AT&T like a public entity. Government intervention was actually what caused the monopoly to exist in the first place, and so government intervention was necessary to break up the juggernaut that it had enabled.

The situation with social media could not be more different. The internet has leveled barriers of entry. Anyone with a computer and coding skill can attempt to create the next big internet phenomenon. Remember that Facebook itself was started by a bunch of college aged kids at Harvard who saw the need for a better networking platform than existed at the time. And anyone arguing that Facebook is immune to free and fair competition will have to recon with the fall of former giants such as MySpace.

• Private Social Media Companies do not violate the First Amendment

Rameupton claims that social media platforms need to be broken up because they are engaged in censorship and are violating free speech principles. But this argument seriously conflates the actions of private companies such as Facebook with government censorship and restrictions on freedom of speech. The First Amendment prohibits only government censorship or speech restrictions. When a private company chooses to restrict speech on its platform, it is not violating the first amendment. To the contrary, the First Amendment protects the right of Facebook to restrict access to the platform that it has created (which is its own private property) for practically any reason. Simply put, Facebook is not required to allow neo-Nazi propaganda, or white supremacist speech, or any other speech that it does not like.

Are there reasons to be concerned when social media sites target conservative voices more aggressively for censorship? Sure. Social media platforms exercise an outsized impact on our culture. And we should criticize them when claim to be unbiased and open but hypocritically go after certain viewpoints.

If we do not like what Facebook does, we have options. We can protest or boycott. We can loudly make the moral case that we should create platforms where sharp differences can be expressed. And if we are really outraged, we can leave and start our own platforms. Indeed, that is what gun enthusiasts did when YouTube began to demonetize gun videos—they created a separate site called Full30.com to promote those videos.

What we cannot do is recruit the government to compel private companies like Facebook to give us a space to express ourselves. That is not within the government’s power to do.

Now, there is a separate but closely related issue concerning whether social media platforms should be held liable for things that users post on their platform. For instance, if I go on Facebook and defame someone, should Facebook be responsible? This is a complex issue that exceeds the scope of this post. But the remarkable success of social media has come precisely because platforms have not been held liable for what users say or do on the platform. And in my opinion it would be an enormous mistake to break down the foundation that has produced immense prosperity and changed the world.

• Regulations are likely to create rather than eliminate monopolies

Rameupton is right about at least one thing, however. We should be suspicious when we see Mark Zuckerberg and others calling on Congress to regulate his company and calling for government led censorship. Could it be that such government action would help to cement Facebook’s position by making it harder for competitors to challenge Facebook? The truth is that when the government steps in, it almost always creates unintentional consequences that harm consumers. We should not rely on the government to fix all of our social media problems.

My newest blog post, discussing Christ in Gethsemane

https://joelsmonastery.blogspot.com/2019/06/come-follow-me-matthew-26-mark-14-luke.html