On Christmas week, Facebook suspended the account of Christian evangelist and philanthropist Franklin Graham — son of the late evangelical giant Billy Graham — for a 2016 post about North Carolina's bathroom bill. Facebook blocked him for 24 hours, but rescinded the ban and apologized. Even so, the action is likely to spark an uproar across the Christian community.So some mid-level busybody millennial tech-bureaucrats decided to fire a warning shot across a prominent Christian's bow during Christmas week. Pure coincidence, huh? And keep in mind that the Facebook higher-ups are simply playing good cop-bad cop in rescinding the ban. The tech monoculture has made somewhat more progress with the atheist-libertarians like Carl Benjamin on the self-styled "intellectual dark web", but they're employing the same formulas and same strategies with Franklin Graham, and this simply isn't the last time they'll use it. As a matter of policy, they'll continue to ban "hate speech" as they arbitrarily define it, and they'll "rescind" such bans based on their whims and what they had for breakfast.
CCC 2357-58 is going to be a target, depend on it. Given the precedent with Carl Benjamin, Fr X can focus his YouTube channel on issues like angels or the Immaculate Conception and come nowhere near same-sex attraction, but because his organization calls it "objectively disordered", he's guilty of "hate speech" whatever he said or didn't say on YouTube. This is going to happen. The surprise for me is why it hasn't already. Depend on it, it will.
Corporations have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to plan for how hurricanes, earthquakes, civil disturbances, and other potential disruptions will potentially affect their operations and have policies and plans in place for responding to them when they happen. In many cases, such plans have been implemented in disaster situations, and companies like banks and utilities have responded and recovered very well.
A social-media "hate speech" attack on the Church is more predictable than a hurricane at this point. It's going to cause a crisis for the Church when it does. The only good part is that the Church doesn't depend as much on Patreon or PayPal as independent YouTubers, and many prominent social-media commentators like Fr Z and Fr Longenecker have set up independent donation channels, something the YouTubers are now being driven to do. But cutting the likes of Bp Barron, EWTN, or Ascension Presents off YouTube would be a crisis that needs to be foreseen and, to the extent possible, forestalled.
To be effective crisis managers, the US bishops, the CDF, and the Holy Father really need to have a response in place. A good plan at the diocesan and USCCB level would include hardening the Church's fundraising channels against arbitrary suspensions by processors like PayPal, a legal strategy that can be implemented quickly with drafts of ex parte motions and restraining orders, a prepared press and public relations response, and in fact an ongoing proactive campaign to indicate the Church is aware of first-amendment issues in the culture at large and will defend its positions.
Someone like Bp Barron from the Church of Nice won't be the guy to do this, though. Whether the Church can come up with an effective plan is an open question.
