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.