Would You Post It On A Billboard?

Ask your students this: What if someone sorted through everything you have posted to social media, found the most hurtful or embarrassing thing you had written, and plastered it on a billboard in your neighborhood? 

Yikes!

That’s exactly what an anti-racist group in Brazil is doing with posts on Facebook that they find especially offensive. 

After identifying racist posts on Facebook, the Rio de Janeiro-based activist group uses geolocation tools to find the place where they originated. It then displays the offensive comments on billboard sites nearby. The name and face of the author are blurred; Criola’s intent is not to expose anyone, but to raise awareness about the effects of posting those kinds of messages online.

The group is hoping that seeing those offensive comments in a public space will make it more obvious to everyone how hurtful they are. 

It’s an interesting idea, but it’s an even better thought experiment for our students (and for us). What if some of our posts were published right out in the open like that? Maybe worse, what if our names and faces were NOT blurred? Would we want that or would we feel completely humiliated? 

This might be a great opportunity for reminding our students that Jesus-followers are supposed to be so different from the world that even our words in texts and Facebook posts don’t look normal. How different? Encourage them to listen to Ephesians 4:29 again: 

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” (Ephesians 4:29)

It’s not normal for people to NEVER post anything that is unwholesome or unhelpful to building others up. In fact, that would be weird. But it’s exactly the standard God has set for Christians—and He doesn’t remove that standard just because someone else is being stupid or hurtful online.

Maybe it would help to imagine each post on a billboard in our neighborhood—with our face on it—before we hit send.