Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, together with the president of the Christian group Focus on the Family, Jim Daly, authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday on “Social Media’s Threat to Religious Freedom.”
They warned that current efforts to promote a liberalization of sexual mores are using social media in a coercive manner, not a tolerant manner….
Archbishop Cordileone and Daly both pointed to the alleged removal of a Presbyterian minister’s Aug. 7 talk from YouTube. Carl Trueman, a minister and professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, had delivered talks on cultural attitudes towards sex, addressed to the Sacramento Gospel Conference.
His talk on “American cultural attitudes toward sex through the lens of classic Christian thought” was supposed to be live-streamed on the YouTube channel of Immanuel Baptist Church. However, the live-stream was twice interrupted, Cordileone and Daly said; once due to a possible copyright infringement from a song played at the conference, and second due to a “content violation.”
“Neither Mr. Trueman nor Immanuel Baptist has been told” how the video was removed, or what the “alleged content violation” was, the op-ed noted.
Catholic News Agency reached out to Google, which owns YouTube, for confirmation of the allegations in the op-ed. Google did not immediately respond to CNA’s inquiry on Friday.
After publication of the story, Pastor Steve Meister of Immanuel Baptist Church in Sacramento told CNA Friday evening that the the allegation made in the op-ed was accurate. The livestream of Trueman’s remarks was stopped twice, for the reasons detailed in the op-ed, he said.
The above comes from an Aug. 13 story on the site of the Catholic News Agency.
Ivan Illich once observed that totalitarianism was impossible before the invention of the loudspeaker. “The encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you are now silenced.”
(From First Things magazine, Aug.-Sept. 2021)
Is access to social media now the equivalent to access to a loudspeaker?
One doesn’t have to agree with Fr. Illich on everything in order to consider the validity of his assertion in this matter. It is thought-provoking and worth considering.
Deacon Craig Anderson, there was no totalitarianism before 1925?
That makes no sense.
Men and women had proper and equal voice before 1925?
That makes no sense.
Are the Taliban using loudspeakers?