Meta is the Catholic Church of Tech
And the child abuse lawsuits have begun. Hallelujah!
Hark! Behold yonder crumbling buttresses of St. Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Cathedral!
Last week in New Mexico, Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, et al.) was fined $375 million after a jury declared the social media giant liable for failing to protect children from exploitation on its apps. The very next day, in Los Angeles, another jury found Meta negligent for designing addictive products that harm kids’ mental health, awarding $6 million in damages. Those penalties are mere chump change given Meta’s monolithic profits, but they represent the first sweet drops of an existential schadenfreude geyser that is set to blow big.
For years, many among us have called Big Tech (and social media in particular) the new Big Tobacco — for hooking kids early, engineering dependency, and blithely ignoring the casualties with zero remorse. But following last week’s legal outcomes, a darker, more apt analogy snaps into focus: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms is the Roman Catholic Church of Big Tech.
By this I don’t mean that Meta is remotely holy, of course — though it has effectively replaced church as a core social nexus for billions. No, I mean that Meta, just like the Catholic Church, has been definitively revealed as a hubristic, deceitful, and morally bankrupt cabal — which has secretly operated a global racket of industrial-scale juvenile predation.
It was 2002 when The Boston Globe exposed the Catholic Church’s long-running policy to perpetuate abuse of children by methodically shielding its rapist fraternity clergy from justice. This past week, evidence presented in the lawsuits against Meta revealed that it too has long embraced grossly immoral policies to exploit children and cause them emotional trauma — policies it has also taken great pains to whitewash and/or cover up entirely.
Meta, just like the Catholic Church, has been definitively revealed as a hubristic, deceitful, and morally bankrupt cabal — which has secretly operated a global racket of industrial-scale juvenile predation.
Indeed, much as the Catholic Church surreptitiously shuffled pedophile priests between parishes rather than having them immediately arrested, Meta Platforms — as revealed by brave employee whistleblowers including Frances Haugen, Sarah Wynn-Williams and Kelly Stonelake — suppressed years of internal evidence warning its products worsened teen mental health and harmed minors. Whether to fill collection plates or pad quarterly earnings reports, both institutions’ priorities were the same: business as usual over the health, dignity and humanity of children.
And yet, for all the Catholic Church’s generations of serial predation, its victim count is generally estimated at hundreds of thousands world-wide. Meta’s brand of digital predation, on the other hand, has in just 20 years touched easily one billion children around the world. In sheer global scale, speed, and sophistication, Mark Zuckerberg’s child harm and exploitation machinery makes the Vatican look like a gaggle of dirty old pervs feebly cranking their bingo cages.
For normal, decent human beings, learning that an innocent child is suffering any kind of harm prompts immediate action to stop said harm. For the Catholic Church and Meta however, learning of rampant in-house child harm instead prompted a mendacious pivot to public relations crisis management. The Church pursued legal settlements and confidentiality agreements, while Meta marshaled lobbyists and deep-pocketed legal defenses. The tactics differed, but the strategy was identical: obscure and distract, and preserve the operational status quo (and bottom line) — kids be damned.
In sheer global scale, speed, and sophistication, Mark Zuckerberg’s child harm and exploitation machinery makes the Vatican look like a gaggle of dirty old pervs feebly cranking their bingo cages.
Their core products may differ: Meta peddles dopamine hits via buggy apps, while the Catholic Church stages franchised weekly theatrical shows imbued with Liberacesque flair — but both wield near-supernatural power over vast swaths of humanity, and both have modeled a callously inhuman institutional disregard for the wellbeing of children.
It was hardly a quarter century ago that the Catholic Church was untouchable. Whatever transpired inside its hallowed walls was largely perceived by the lay public as beyond reproach — spiritual work possessed of import and power beyond the comprehension of we puny mortals. Its gilded facade of righteousness was too impressive, too storied, too divinity-adjacent to suffer irreverence or critique of any kind.
Until now, Meta has enjoyed an eerily similar imperviousness to scrutiny. From its heavily fortified citadel in Silicon Valley, it has spent decades preaching Zuckerberg’s vacuous gospel of making the world “more open and more connected,” when in fact its mission has been to deploy a vast digital fishing net, crudely trawling the ocean of humanity for its own rapacious profit. Yet our society has watched Meta’s rise with the same kind of willfully blind reverence once reserved for the Catholic Church. Their tech secret sauce of algorithms and pixels transfixed us in a kind of ecstasy, compelling us into previously unimaginable interactions and behaviors.
Today however, following decades of still unfolding revelations and litigation over its sins, the Catholic Church is a grievously damaged brand – its very name synonymous with the most vile and cowardly crimes imaginable, an easy punchline to crass jokes and shorthand for referencing scummy molesters and shameless, hypocritical liars. We’ve watched the Church’s moral authority implode as it has paid out well over $10 billion in damages, and shuttered hundreds of bankrupt dioceses littered with subpoenas and empty pews. It is a hobbled, marginally solvent shell of its former omnipotent self — and its eventual fading into the mists of religious history alongside gnosticism, Aztec human sacrifice, and EST is no longer unimaginable.
And now, for the first time, we can dare to imagine a future wherein Meta follows the Catholic Church down the same pathway of increasingly powerless infamy, irrelevance, and insolvency. Yes, this first round of legal damages against Meta is still under $400M, which is but a rounding error in Zuckerberg’s obscene annual revenues, but the precedent is set. And just like the Catholic Church 24 years ago, the floodgates of civil litigation against Meta are poised to open, unleashing a tsunami of long-overdue justice.
Our Meta,
Who art in Menlo Park,
Cursed be thy name.
Thy downfall come,
Thy will undone, on earth as in the Cloud.
Surrender this day our children’s souls,
And forgive us our glee,
As we crucify thee who trespasses against us.
And lead us not into thy doomscroll,
But deliver us from thy evil.
Amen.
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About John Allen Wooden:
Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com
Such a timely post! Thank you. The meta slop ai artwork is the cherry on top. Not a good look Zuck…