Francesca

This Question for Questions Answered emanates from the western side of the parish in the countryside around Buckingham, from a young dancer who became a housewife and who presides over a raucous household of 2 teenage girls who are often on the world wide web, doing their FB thing with their futures and their images.

Fr dear Fr: When are we going to hear from the official boards of Big Tech like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp about their effect on the mental health and morals of young teenage girls, surely Francesca is right to highlight the problem as a failure of personal ethics?

Technically, the enquirer, a young housewifey from Buckingham, is more really concerned about a problem of something historically called epistemology than private and personal ethics. Well of course all 3 companies mentioned above, FB and Insta and WA are owned if not managed by the Board of FB, and it is not Francesca who has just invented or highlighted the problem of the teenage girl posting on those platforms but their own internal FB report on the long term psychological effects of posting wildly without restraint on those platforms, so evidently Marcus and the Data fans are not unconcerned about teenage girl ethics it has to be said from day one, and Francesca got involved as a whistler chiefly and only when that internal report about teenager psychology was quietly and secretly shelved for further discussion - it certainly looked to a concerned future mother of daughters like the report was shelved in the interests of continuing profits or something the renaissance moderne Italians like to call allargamento. Hence why Francesca eventually spirited away some 10,000 documents from FB just before the outage last week on the 4th October 21. Morals are a painful subject to bring up for such platforms and for such girls, and their standard defence is that every user is free to enjoy the platform and the instant celebrity that it makes of them which is fair enough - though part of the problem is that nobody believes there are experts in things like morals or personal private ethics or PPE, but the underlying psychology problem is what moral experts call the EPG or epistemological payback gap, when a teenage girl thinks wrongly that when she is posting in the quiet comforts of her bedroom that she is not really posting to the public forums and public market out there beyond her little screen and her little bedroom. The illusion is intimacy, the effect is celebrity. A credibility gap then opens up. Ethics committees should exist on such companies, and if they did exist, then the Senate and Congress could not to appoint their own Ethics committees with legal effect. The rest is history, or rather can be, something the girl’s parents then have to download into their frontrooms at the front of the house - not a pleasant prospect - 15 minutes of celebrity, but it can be like a drug for young girls, and all because of EPG. So that is what Francesca is understandable about - she is worried that such secret internal memo reports at FB are quietly sitting there gathering dust while girls suffer the terrible cost of a discipleship to fame and celebrity and all the inner demons of self-doubt in the lives of popstars that go with them, including rehab, something that rehab clinics may yet have to consider when planning for a much bigger future than hitherto thought - internet rehab classes. PPE Ethics - a new branch of the world of pop, but slowly and increasingly necessary.