Facebook, Google, and the radical new gatekeepers

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Facebook lately has been doing some public relations repair work after revelations that its trending news team screened out conservative content in favor of promoting liberal content. The story serves as a reminder that the media revolution is creating a new set of cultural gatekeepers. And these gatekeepers may be even more secularist and radical than the old ones.

A few weeks ago, Google paid tribute to a “human rights activist” with its doodle, the drawing that spells “Google” on the search engine’s home page. The doodle often celebrates holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays of famous people in history. This doodle was an homage to Yuri Kochiyama, an anti-Western activist who supported Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, and even Osama bin Laden. Kochiyama was a Japanese-American placed in a U.S. internment camp during World War II. She emerged to fight for justice and against oppression but did so in all the wrong ways, John Stonestreet said.

“She spent decades of her life supporting some of the worst movements and political regimes on the planet,” Stonestreet said. At one point, Kochiyama wrote that she admired bin Laden and thanked Islam for him—illustrating the importance of worldview.

“The question every worldview answers is, ‘What’s wrong with the world and how do we fix it?’” Stonestreet said. “If you don’t diagnose the problem correctly, then your treatment is going to create more brokenness.”

It’s possible, Stonestreet said, to hurt the victims you want to help if you support bad ideas for good reasons.

“We can’t just help people with our heart,” he said. “We have to help them with our head, as well.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.