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Facebook is Now Aggressively Courting a New Partner: Churches (yahoo.com) 126

Posted by EditorDavid from the rendering-unto-Zuckerberg dept.
When the 150,000-member "megachurch" Hillsong opened a branch in Atlanta, its pastor Sam Collier says Facebook suggested using it to explore how churches can "go further farther on Facebook..." reports the New York Times: He is partnering with Facebook, he said, "to directly impact and help churches navigate and reach the consumer better."

"Consumer isn't the right word," he said, correcting himself. "Reach the parishioner better."
Facebook's involvement with churches has been intense: For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong's grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was "partnering with Facebook" and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.

Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement...

"Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook..."

[Facebook] has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed religious groups to explore new ways to operate, Facebook sees even greater strategic opportunity to draw highly engaged users onto its platform. The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money. It is developing new products, including audio and prayer sharing, aimed at faith groups...

The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life... The collaborations raise not only practical questions, but also philosophical and moral ones... There are privacy worries too, as people share some of their most intimate life details with their spiritual communities. The potential for Facebook to gather valuable user information creates "enormous" concerns, said Sarah Lane Ritchie, a lecturer in theology and science at the University of Edinburgh...

"Corporations are not worried about moral codes," she said. "I don't think we know yet all the ways in which this marriage between Big Tech and the church will play out." Last month Facebook held a summit "which resembled a religious service," the Times reports, at which Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said churches were a natural fit for Facebook "because fundamentally both are about connection."

But the article also notes the 6-million member Church of God in Christ "received early access to several of Facebook's monetization features," testing paid subscriptions for exclusive church content, as well as real-time donations during services. But "Leaders decided against a third feature: advertisements during video streams."
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Facebook is Now Aggressively Courting a New Partner: Churches More

Facebook is Now Aggressively Courting a New Partner: Churches

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  • the church of Facebook pays no tax! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the church of Facebook pays no tax!

    • Why should they pay a tax when they provide a valuable service? The service is the tax.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      Will they collect a fee for donations made via facebook or will the data be enough

      • Re: the church of Facebook pays no tax! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @08:02AM (#61620947)
        It was no surprise to see it was a church with 150,000 members. These megachurches are about one thing - money. The bigger the megachurch the more lavish the lifestyle of the leader. It reminds me of the skits Sam Kinneson used to do about these people. One minister per 100-200 parishioners is about all one person can truly manage if they are to be their life coach. Its not supposed to be a money making enterprise. "God said I needed a new dreamliner yacht. So dig deep into those pockets when you donate in order to gain gods acceptance"

        • why should 150,000 people each spend their money on another big screen TV or a smart fridge or whatever, when they could give it all to one person who can buy a yacht, or a mansion, or drugs and prostitutes, or maybe get into politics?

          this is the power of teamwork! hucksters provide a useful service by concentrating the money of dumbfuck plebs.

        • Well you do get a seed for it sometimes and it all squares off in the end. Seed, tree, orchard, orchards, fruits, jam and then money, money money...

    • The day I can get a SEPARATE COMMUNITY whose only community standards are THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH I'll go back to facebook.

      Until then, http://www.sp3rn.com/ [sp3rn.com] is good enough for me when it comes to church integration with social media.

      • I'll check this out when I get home since I got security ssl errors here at work.

        I'm hoping this is a real thing and not just sarcasm.

        That said, the Church really needs to step up. It's saddening that the Church that used to send priests to take care of lepers, risk being fed to lions, etc, cowered so fully and shut it's doors during covid.

        I still send my kiddo to Catholic school and know history enough to know we've had bad pope's before, but as someone that was born the year John Paul II became pope, thi

        • YMMV- it's a rather orthodox community that you need to affirm your baptismal vows to join, and that the prompt for sharing is "Share something your Guardian Angel would be proud of".

          In reality, it's devolving in the last week into a big gripe session about Pope Francis and the Traditional Latin Mass.

  • Sympathy for Zuck (Score:5, Funny)

    by suss ( 158993 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @08:43PM (#61620029)

    Please allow me to introduce myself
    I'm a man of wealth, no taste...

    [Sung in a robotic voice]

  • Obvious reason (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Zuckerberg knows he's going to hell, he's just trying to buy himself some time.

    • Zuckerberg knows he's going to hell, he's just trying to buy himself some time.

      Heard me bought a nice island down there. Like he gives a Zuck.

    • Given how much bile, vitriol, hatred, envy and lies that facebook has helped spread across the globe, when Zuck eventually does reach Hell they'll probably treat him like some sort of anti-saint.

      If he does receive any sort of eternal punishment it will most likely be because he made Screwtape look like a rank amateur (to say nothing of the Unholy Father).

  • Expand the base (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Patent Lover ( 779809 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @08:51PM (#61620049)
    Hey, why not add one more cult of disinformation? The more the merrier.

  • Sounds like a joke. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @09:04PM (#61620073)

    I'm pretty sure this is the setup for a joke.

    So the Devil tells Churches, "I'll host your content for free and we have lots of nice features for you."

    I don't know the punchline but I'm not laughing.

  • Exclusive Facebook streaming = no stream (Score:5, Informative)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @09:07PM (#61620077) Homepage Journal

    I don't know if they gave this church access to some special magic Facebook service that actually works, but I've never seen such a disaster as when I tried to do weekly church live streams through Facebook. At least once a month, it just plain didn't work at all.

    The problem with Facebook is that they basically expose parts of their server infrastructure to the end user in the form of magic hidden values in the HTML/JavaScript. If you start the process of configuring a streaming session and Facebook's servers decide to latch on to it, suddenly that browser window becomes the only way you can get Facebook to start streaming, because that server session, tied to a hidden identifier in the content somewhere, steals exclusive use of your page's persistent stream key.

    And if you try to create a new window and start the stream, even if you're editing the event that's tied to the stream, you won't be able to, because that one server session has exclusive control over your key. But if you're successfully able to use your browser's history to get back to the exact page that last had access to the session, it magically works.

    What this means is that if the person configuring the stream messes up, there's a good chance it won't be easily fixable, and there's no way that some on-call expert can fix the problem remotely, either, because the browser cache is per-device.

    Facebook's streaming system is clearly designed under the assumption that nobody will do anything more complicated than doing live streaming with the camera in a cell phone (with a non-persistent key), and that's pretty much the only part of it that works reliably.

    Worse, I've sent feedback to Facebook on this issue on probably double-digit occasions, and after a year, they still hadn't done anything to fix it as of when I stopped caring a few weeks back (because we stopped doing weekly livestreams). Based on that experience, I can only assume that Facebook just plain doesn't care if their streaming feature actually works, so I can't imagine why anyone would choose Facebook as an exclusive provider. That seems like the most surefire way to frequently not have a live stream at all.

    But I guess everybody has to learn that lesson themselves. In a year, I predict that they'll be on YouTube or Vimeo. Just saying.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by c-A-d ( 77980 )

      My old church did Facebook streaming. I, and others, told them that we won't be viewing if it is on facebook (mostly because I couldn't put it on my big screen TV), but the media team didn't know how to do anything else.

      I never did watch one of the streams.

    • As with many churches, we leaned into live-streaming when the pandemic hit. There was one week about a year ago when we had to fall back to Facebook because YouTube changed something and temporarily broke our ability to stream from our streaming appliance box thing we were using at the time. We were able to get Facebook set up easily enough, embedded the stream in our church’s site where we’d normally have the YouTube embed, and blasted out the info to everyone a few days in advance, but our vie

  • Consumer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IUsedToComeHere ( 8426209 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @09:11PM (#61620083)

    "Consumer isn't the right word," he said, correcting himself.

    He had it right. Churches are certainly not looking for people who won't pay a tithe.

    Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said churches were a natural fit for Facebook "because fundamentally both are about connection."

    LMAO! Really?! From what I can see Facebook and churches are alike not because of connection, but because they are both about obtaining money and power. The good they do in the world is outweighed by the bad, heavily.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      dont forget manipulation and misinformation

    • Re: Consumer (Score:3, Insightful)

      by argStyopa ( 232550 )

      "The good they do in the world is outweighed by the bad, heavily."

      I don't like, nor participate in, Facebook.
      I'm not religious, nor do I go to a church regularly.

      But this sentence jars with reality so badly, and is so obviously fueled by anti religious dogma that I had to call you out.
      No question, religion has been the excuse for some pretty massive and heinous wrongs. But your assertion ignores the constant, daily, positive meaningful things that religion and churches do for their communities every single

  • ... given to the natives. A lovely gift that will make you sick.

  • Day Late, and a Dollar Short (Score:4, Informative)

    by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Sunday July 25, 2021 @10:41PM (#61620205)

    So, I've done church media for a while, and have done so since before Myspace was in its prime...and the math simply isn't working here, as far as I can tell.

    Churches already do plenty of live streaming. Churches that weren't streaming their services online prior to 2020 started not long after. Churches that weren't receiving online donations prior to 2020 also started providing modern means of donations once offering plates couldn't be passed.

    However, there are two notable things about this story.

    First, Hillsong is massive. It's not quite Catholic Church massive...but as far as protestant churches that aren't aligned with some sort of a larger denominational organization (Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Assembly of God, etc.), they may well be the largest if all of their satellite campuses worldwide are counted. Amongst the reason they are that massive is due to their use of both traditional and social media outlets. Songs from their worship bands are played constantly on terrestrial radio and on Spotify, they have Youtube videos with millions of views, and their Instagram stories get shared hundreds of thousands of times every week. Facebook courting Hillsong because of the hugeness of their organization seems logical, but because of its size and reach, Hillsong simply isn't representative of the hundreds of thousands of 30-500 parishioner churches that meet every week.

    On the coattails of that is that Facebook is chasing Hillsong precisely because Hillsong doesn't need them. They're so big that they have plenty of technical people who can do basically anything Facebook wants to provide to them. Whether they want to do video streaming or some sort of Reddit-like online church community or online donations, Hillsong is big enough to not-need Facebook to do it. They can (and probably do) use Akamai or AWS or Cloudflare as a CDN. Donations are handled by Pushpay, a company used by lots of nonprofits for online donations.
    Facebook could probably help out with some sort of online community function better than a roll-your-own solution, but that's primarily due to Facebook's network effect...and even then, "download the hillsong App" with some StackOverflow code that combines something Instagram-like with something Pandora-like and something Whatsapp-like, maybe a Bible tab, a LiveStream tab, and a Donation tab. They're big enough to justify having people download Yet Another App. Facebook needs to court Hillsong because an organization that size can easily replace them in their niche.

    Essentially, Facebook trying to pull Hillsong away from their existing solutions for an online presence would make sense for Hillsong. Those other churches? Well, they're a different story.

    Yes, many of them use Pushpay and Akamai and AWS, and there's a cottage industry of "online church in a box" that makes an app and a streaming platform and a website all readily functional...but an iPhone 6S, a Wi-Fi connection, and the Facebook app is all the smaller churches need to do a live stream...and many already do. Similarly, most of the smaller churches do already use Facebook and Instagram for their online communities.

    More to the point, the smaller churches that didn't have this in place pre-Covid, suddenly found themselves forced into it. Facebook already handles those smaller churches' online components because they tend to be the avenue of least resistance for most small churches that don't have tech specialists in their ranks.

    All of this to ask...what exactly is Facebook trying to do now? They already have the small churches. The medium sized churches probably have a Facebook presence in addition to a limited number of other services, and Hillsong (and Saddleback, and Elevation, and some of the other super mega churches) have had an online presence for years with dedicated IT professionals and media specialists handling them.
    If Facebook was going to try and tap the faith market, March/April 2020 was the time to do it. "When churches are finally opening up after over a year of implementing their online presence, via Facebook or otherwise" doesn't seem to be the sort of strategic move that is useful for Hillsong, for smaller churches, or for Facebook itself.

  • Fits nicely (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday July 25, 2021 @11:20PM (#61620237)

    Evil collaborating with evil is not a surprise.

  • The job of antitrust regulators tasked with breaking up the social media giant just got easier....

    Say hell-oh to Facebook and their holier spinoff Faithbook.

    ok it was kinda funny, A little.

    csw

  • The mutant creature rises from this union.

  • The Revelation, specifically.

  • Obviously they haven't read Matthew 10:8 or Acts 8:20 ... "You received free, give free" "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could acquire the free gift of God with money."

  • ... the church could be on Facebook ...

    "Forgive me, Facebook, for I have sinned."

    The Facebook marketing department (and US NSA/DHS/FBI) must be wetting themselves with glee over this opportunity.

  • Why not the churches?
    All the other delusions are already there.

  • Facebook, make up your mind (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @05:37AM (#61620637)

    You can either fight misinformation and false news [facebook.com] or team up with religion. You can't do both.

    • Makes me glad that I am not an active FB user.

      And how long before other religious organisations start to demand equal access?

      Wonder when the Church of Satan will start it's livestreams.

      And what of religions which have nudity as part of the rituals? Wicca? Raëlism?

      Those were the ones I came out with from a quick Google search. Am sure there is more.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by auxsvr ( 811165 )
      That's interesting, because I'm aware of at least a few occasions when Church bishops etc were making statements Facebook regards as false, but they are actually demonstrably true. The latest example was regarding the Pfizer vaccine and the use of aborted fetus lines for its testing, in which Pfizer/BioNTech scientists themselves were stating that they used these fetus lines and the fact checkers of Facebook claimed that this is misinformation!

  • Cults of a feather flock together (Score:4, Interesting)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @05:50AM (#61620669)

    Preying on the weak and gullible is a hallmark of both Facebook and religion. It's obvious these two will make a great match.

  • So is this a political move? (Score:4)

    by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @07:43AM (#61620887)

    Is Facebook casting its lot with the Republicans once and for all? Build up a base of evangelicals, perhaps partly by giving away some level of Facebook tools and access not available to run of the mill organizations and then rely on them to push back at attempts by Democratic elements looking to regulate or criticize Facebook's profiteering on right wing misinformation?

    • Facebook's most loyal customers are those who like to submit to authority figures - God, Government, Corporations like Facebook, etc.

      Facebook's own serving algorithms are their gospel. It's no surprise to see this alliance.

      • It's so funny how a platform designed around enhancing the social connections of elite college students has become the platform for the opposite demographic, dumb, blue collar types, to enhance their social connections.

        Funnier yet is that the effort to recruit conservative Christians is being spearheaded by two Jews, Zuck and Sandberg. I hesitate to point this out in many ways because it sounds so awful but its such a rich irony.

  • that two money-grubbing brainwashing soulless propagandists should unite to increase the range, extent, and lucrativeness of the psychological and societal damage they're both intent on causing.

    Also, I'm not sure whether the pastor saying "consumers", then correcting it to "parishioners", was the kind of error you'd expect from an Elmer Gantry, or the kind of "watch what I can get away with" you'd expect from his new crony The Zuck.

  • Totally checks out - used to go to church and participated in evangelism meetings. They play out just like a corporate marketing meeting with city demographic mapping data and using normal top of funnel marketing tools like event lead gen, direct mailing, word of mouth campaigns by parishioners and sometimes a paid missionary sales force.

    Churches have a huge inflow of cash for building up growth and FB wants it. They want churches to start reaching out for these digital services with huge ad buys. I mean t

  • Facebook is well known for spreading misinformation, so this is aligned nicely with that mission.

  • Interesting (Score:3)

    by laie_techie ( 883464 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @10:17AM (#61621285)

    I belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This pandemic caused us to close our chapels, at least for a few months. Each family was authorized to administer the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper and perform their own weekly worship services. About that time I saw a comic where in the first frame the devil was bragging how he closed millions of chapels and temples; the second frame had God bragging how he converted millions of homes into churches. Eventually Church HQ authorized congregations to stream weekly worship services over YouTube, but the Sacrament itself couldn't be transmitted. We are now at a point where people can attend worship services in person or stream, based on each family's needs and comfort level.

    Facebook is smart to want to provide this service, but a bit late to the game. I'm not sure how appropriate ads before, during, and after the broadcast would be.

    • You too? Just wanted to let you know...

  • So Facebook after going true profits is going after false prophets now? /s

  • are soon parted - jesus needs a new lear jet !!

  • Facebook seemed to have a lock on Catholic Church direct streaming at the start of the pandemic. To a large extent it still does. Luckily, it was in a form that could (usually) be viewed without actually logging in to Facebook. Some later duplicated their streams on Youtube, which is easier to connect to without an account though about equally intrusive, but they were a minority; FB still mostly owns that market. Somehow, in most cases, neither FB nor YT show ads (how much did THAT cost the parish?). FB sti

  • Gotta love that one. ALL religion is misinformation!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbreeze ( 228599 )

      Pretty much what Jesus said... https://www.blueletterbible.or... [blueletterbible.org]

      [Mat 23:2-36 KJV] 2 Saying, The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: 3 All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, [that] observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not. 4 For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay [them] on men's shoulders; but they [themselves] will not move them with one of their fingers. 5 But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their ph

  • [1Ti 6:10 KJV] 10 For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

    [Mat 7:21-23 KJV] 21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? 23

  • "Reach the product better."

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