What Big Tech Execs Know About Worship That We Don’t
The recent court case against Meta seemed huge: they settled for $18 billion.
Meta was accused by dozens of U.S. states and territories of purposely using social media to addict children and teenagers to its platforms—Facebook and Instagram—while misleading the public about its destructive effects on mental health. Plus, Meta was accused of collecting data on children under thirteen without parental permission, which, as it turns out, violates state and federal laws.
For what it’s worth, that settlement is only a little over 1% of Meta’s humongous valuation. And, of course, the agreement allows them to avoid admitting any wrongdoing.
Yep, that’s how our judicial system works.
The case drew comparisons to Big Tobacco. For years, the tobacco industry lobbied against the idea that ingesting tobacco in any form carried negative health dangers or was addictive, even though insider communications eventually revealed they knew the exact opposite.
But here are some stats that fascinated me:
Peter Thiel—founder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early investor in Facebook—only allows his two kiddos an hour and a half of screen time per week. Thiel is the multi-billionaire who has implied that the Antichrist will be anyone who opposes any restraint or regulation of artificial intelligence or technology. Hoo boy—I’ve written about him here.
Bill Gates—you all know him—didn’t give his kids a smartphone until they were fourteen.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, admitted he might have “made a mistake” by not setting social media parameters for his kids.
The CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, allows his child only ninety minutes a week. Hmm… I’m seeing a pattern.
Steve Chen, founder of YouTube, allows his kids to watch short-form videos for only fifteen minutes, believing it leads to shorter attention spans.
A study from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reveals that kids eight to eighteen spend about 7.5 hours a day on screens. Compare that to the Big Tech titans above. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
I’m feeling convicted about my own screen time now.
But here’s my point.
I have sometimes defined worship simply as focused attention. Yes, that’s a bare-bones definition, but I think it's valid. And so, in the case of social media and screen time, we have to seriously consider this and help people—particularly students—find recovery-oriented ways of managing it. No kidding.
But I propose that simply explaining an element of worship as whatever we focus our attention on is helpful and purposely challenging for people to process. And even more: how do we lead our people to focus their attention in a meaningful way when we gather on weekends in our churches, especially since that may be the only time many of them actually worship?
Leaders, this brings your worship gatherings into a place of reevaluation, organizational honesty, and challenge. Are your people actually focusing attention on Jesus in an intimate way?
Do you need to seriously rethink how you enable them to do that? And what are the real barriers?
Dave Workman | The Elemental Group
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