The word “education” generally inspires mental images of a formal instructional setting, a teacher dispensing knowledge to an undifferentiated (and often uninterested) mass of students in a nondescript classroom.
Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, thought education was something quite different. In his famous Allegory of the Cave, Socrates argues, “education isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.”[1] In simpler terms, education isn’t about teaching someone to memorize and recall certain facts about the world; instead, it is about shaping an individual’s values and directing their whole person to good purposes.
From this perspective, the most pervasive education today comes not from lecture halls but from screens, and the recent governor’s race in California has revealed how dark money uses social media to redirect our souls. According to recent Semafor reporting, billionaire candidate Tom Steyer covertly cooperated with and paid massive Instagram accounts (like the Shade Room with 28 million followers and Foos Gone Wild with 3 million) to post apparently-organic content favorable to his campaign. While Steyer’s team disclosed payments to these accounts after catching the attention of the New York Times and California regulators, they also provided evidence that the same surreptitious tactics were deployed against Steyer’s campaign.
New York Magazine’s Lane Brown exposed the same across different industries, chronicling how they manufacture virality in an excellently titled piece “The Feed Is Fake.” Take, for example, the now-defunct company Floodify. Joe Lim, a former executive, explains that Floodify operated 65,000 social media accounts, sometimes posting 50,000 videos for record labels, movie studios, celebrities, politicians and podcasters. In each of these cases, the organizations paid Floodify to make the excitement surrounding their person or product feel authentic through fake accounts, and according to Lim’s estimate, 90% of internet content is now just disguised advertising.
Other reports have indicated that foreign actors also use social media to educate Americans, dividing the public or selling us bogus health products.
Under Socrates’ understanding, these covert advertising campaigns are educating souls, often without us even realizing the impact or origin of this education. Firms or countries generate and promote social media content in order to mold our opinions and values, manipulating how we think and feel about political leaders or toying with the values that motivate us. At the same time that our data is sold, our attention is purchased as powerful actors seek to shape our allegiances, interests and frustrations.
Since basically the start of our faith, Christians have shared Socrates’ take on education and intentionally worked to direct the eyes of our hearts toward God (Eph. 1:18). As Jesus taught us, trouble, persecution, worldly cares and the seductiveness of wealth offer to us a destructive kind of education that disorients our souls by shifting our focus away from God (Mat. 13:21-2). For this reason, Christians have made use of practices like Lectio Divina, the Jesuit daily examen or regular, devotional Scripture reading to intentionally keep ourselves fixed on Jesus amid a world that constantly works to divert our attention (Heb. 12:2).
Recognizing the corrosive education Athenian society offered, Socrates advocated for a separate education for those determined to good lives, and many Christians across history have likewise retreated from the world to preserve control over our soul’s education. For example, inspired by Jesus’ example in Matthew 4, many fourth-century Christians took to the desert and adopted extreme practices of self-discipline to steel their souls against imperial decadence after Christianity became relatively chic in the Roman Empire. After all, bad company corrupts good morals (1 Co. 15:33).
But as St. Paul suggests ironically, if we made it our goal not to associate with any of this world’s potentially misleading education, we would then have to go out of the world (1 Co. 5:9-10).
Rather than totally retreating from attempts to redirect our souls, God gives us a different ethic, a way to live that is beyond comparison (1 Co. 12:31). In Jesus, God did not run away from the world but rather made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us (2 Co. 5:21). And while reconciling us to God, Jesus himself associated with tax collectors and sinners (Mat. 9:11), the exact cast of characters who were sure to miseducate a person’s soul.
In the same way, we are called to be witnesses for God’s great love in the farthest parts of the earth (Act. 1:8), to be ambassadors for Christ shaping life around us for the better rather than a bunch of generals protecting ourselves in some impenetrable bunker (2 Co. 5:20).
Instead of leaving the digital world for dead, St. Paul offers an alternative approach, charging us with the responsibility to exercise control over our own lives and education: “consider carefully how you live—not as unwise but as wise” (Eph. 5:15). In other words, we do not have to avoid or reject social media entirely, but we must be sober and alert in our engagement with it (1 Pe. 5:8), thinking critically about the way our feeds educate our souls and retaking control over this often thoughtless education.
Living wisely in the digital age means that we probably won’t find a simple, blanket policy we can apply for all social media; as the Proverbs imply, the same action can be recommended or ill-advised based on different circumstances (cf. Pro. 26:4-5). Instead, we have to develop and exercise judgement over our own social media use.
To use my own life as an example, social media sometimes educates my soul well: Marco Polo, for example, allows me to keep up with friends and family, directing my attention to good, loving relationships. In other cases, social media has little to no poisonous effects if I carefully manage the dosage: while Reddit and Substack help me stay informed about sports, artificial intelligence and world news, they also pull me unthinkingly into nearly endless screentime, so I have to use ScreenZen to limit my access. And in still other cases, some social media platforms disorient me so deeply that I avoid them altogether: aside from sharing my Substack and occasionally exchanging a message with a friend, I myself have retreated from Facebook, X and Instagram altogether because I always find myself angrier and more anxious after I use them. By using different policies for different apps, I regain authority over the education that others would covertly impose on me.
The steps we use to retake power over our education must also go beyond the individual. When radio, newspapers or cable television dominated information and entertainment, we collectively placed limits on their power to covertly educate the American people. The Communications Act of 1934, for example, required financial disclosure for anything broadcast for money, but this precedent has not been consistently extended to social media. Likewise, the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 forced cable companies to carry channels they might not like, limiting companies’ power to censor content they didn’t like and giving viewers more control over their own education. In the same way, policies that empower people, especially young people, to critically and transparently engage with social media’s influence should get the support of American Christians.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates spends much of his time condemning the education that poetry, music and other parts of Athens’ culture offer its citizens, and Christians have likewise made caring for the soul a core part of religious practice. The Proverbs famously recommend that we guard our hearts with all vigilance (Pro. 4:23). Jesus builds on this point, teaching that the good person brings good things out of his good treasury—out of what he stores in his soul—while the evil person brings evil things out of his evil treasury (Mat. 12:35). St. James continues this thread after Jesus, recognizing that the passions that battle inside our soul push us to conflicts, quarrels, murder and envy (Jam. 4:1-2) and challenging Christians to keep our souls unstained by the world (Jam. 1:27).
Christians, then, have good reason to be wary of the education that social media imposes on our souls, especially as unidentifiable actors co-opt these platforms to shape our values in undiscernible ways. But we also have power to reassert over these forces, and as envoys working for a loving God, we have a responsibility to use both individual practices and collective action to direct our cities toward the peace and prosperity God has for them (Jer. 29:7).
[1] Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 518d.
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