Society has mutated into “ungovernable protest movements” as a result of social media, the head of the Church of Ireland has warned.
Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd John McDowell, has blamed the likes of Twitter and Facebook for the “atomisation” of public debate.
Far from its stated aims of connecting people, social media has become about users “performing for like-minded people” and churches should not stand idly by but rather intervene to shape nationally important discussions, he suggested.
Speaking at the church’s governing body, the General Synod, the Archbishop said even democratic governments are responding to social media by “deepening” rather than “healing” the divisions it is creating.
It is, he told the General Synod meeting at Assembly Buildings in Belfast, “the single biggest contributing factor to this atomisation of the public space.
“Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that social media is largely to blame following the turn it took when it became less about people connecting with other people, and more about people performing for like-minded people,” he said.
Social media is “dissolving social capital” and “chronically suspicious of institutions and, to use the jargon, refusing any meta-narrative,” he said in remarks reported by the Belfast Newsletter on Thursday.
“The effect has been, as one commentator has put it, to turn nations into ungovernable protest movements.
“That in turn has led to governments, even in some democratic countries, to choose to manage these divisions by deepening them rather than by healing them.”
Archbishop McDowell said “it is important, in fact vocational, for a number of reasons, that civic society, including churches, contribute to public debate on these matters.”
In his presidential address, the church leader also urged Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to help to bring the war in Ukraine to a “just end”.