Social media use is growing around the world. There are currently 5.41 billion people using social media globally with about 63% of the world’s population actively using at least one platform.[1] Social media platforms are popular among marketers as well, spending $247.3 billion on social media advertising globally in 2025, and comprising 30% of all digital advertising spending.[2]
Social media’s positive impact includes connecting people with similar interests, giving individuals a public voice that has been previously denied to them, and increasing transparency and accountability of companies.[3] However, social media platforms have also been accused of intentionally addicting their users,[4] fostering an inordinate amount of self-love, encouraging excessive pursuit of the approval of others, inciting vanity and lust, propagating false information, encouraging dogmatism, and creating divisiveness among people.[5] Rising concerns about the impact of social media on society have led some corporations to encourage customers to avoid social media;[6] some governments to enact regulations seeking to protect citizens from the negative impacts of social media;[7] and some activists to better inform society about its dangers and advocate for more government regulation. The concerns about social media companies and the desire to enforce some type of accountability recently led to the first legal verdict against social media companies for intentionally promoting addictive behavior in young people.[8]
Many of the calls for the reform of social media are focused on the actions and regulation of social media companies themselves. However, there are plenty of other actors in the public sphere who are complicit in the abuses of social media companies. In this article, we will argue that Christian advertisers who utilize social media for profit by creating the advertising content which funds these social media platforms have a moral responsibility for the content which they produce. We will explore these responsibilities of social media marketers by drawing upon Augustine’s teachings about human flourishing and the pursuit of peace as a guiding framework. Rather than a laissez-faire approach to social media content production, we will argue that Christians have an obligation in their work to contribute to human peace by promoting good goods achieved in the right way rather than exploiting users by creating constant desires which contradict true freedom within them. We will first consider the theological grounding for the idea that Christian marketers have responsibility which extends to the end users of their products as well as their clients. We will then explore Augustine’s discussion of peace as the ultimate goal of the human person in order to provide a coherent definition of the human goods which marketers should seek to promote. Finally, we will consider the practical implications of this development of Augustine’s thoughts for Christian social media marketers—taking as our case study Christian colleges and universities.
The Responsibility of Marketers to Society
The foundation for our argument is that the Christian life demands integration of faith in work, not a separation between practices of Christian faith on Sunday and secular morals for the office. Generally, arguments for integration presuppose that Christians respect the very basic commands of the Decalogue in their work life as well as their private lives: Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t covet, don’t commit adultery, don’t kill. However, the complications of contemporary business life—especially in relationship to technology—require us to move beyond a simple deontological reliance on basic precepts. Rather, considering these complex ethical challenges of the modern world requires a deeper theological conception of the human person and the role of our work in contributing to the common good. We must ask not only whether there is an evil to avoid but also whether there is a good we seek to advance. In addition, the distancing effect of technology requires us to consider the question “Am I my brother’s keeper?”[9] with more intentionality and more imagination regarding what justice to the other demands of us.
The fundamental theological presupposition underlying our argument is the conviction that each person is a bearer of the imago Dei.[10] The corollary assumption is that our treatment of others is subject to what Jesus identifies as the second commandment—“Love your neighbor as yourself.”[11] While these are generally held theological beliefs, they raise further less resolved questions regarding to what extent this Christlike love should inform the work itself in which Christians engage—both its ends and its methods. In other words, how deep and how radical should the Christian attempt to overcome the Sunday/Monday cleavage be? Does Christian faith simply instantiate ethical norms for how we engage in “business as usual” or does it actually transform the process of doing business itself?
In this paper, we will argue that Christian faith impacts not only how a person conducts herself in business, but also the type of business she engages in as well. We believe that acknowledging that faith should inform the “matter” of business, not simply the method, is especially salient for discussions of the relationship between faith and marketing generally, and especially marketing conducted through social media channels. As Marshall McLuhan famously described, often the “medium is the message.”[12] McLuhan pointed out that the methods we use to distribute content (the media we use) can impact those who consume it as much as the message itself. For example, the way social media platforms deliver information through scrolling newsfeeds encourages its users to provide quick responses which can shape the way they perceive the world. Therefore, the discussion as to appropriate Christian engagement with marketing on social media should not only consider basic questions of ethical behavior but the moral significance of the “medium” as well. This includes an analysis as to social media’s broader impact and effect upon society and its users.
We believe that this expansive view of Christian marketers’ responsibility for the use of social media is clearly included in Jesus’s mandate to all people to “love one another.”[13] In the Vatican document by the Dicastery for Communication, Towards Full Presence, the authors frame their discussion of proper social media use with a reminder that Jesus answers the question “Who is my neighbor?” with the parable of the Good Samaritan.[14] If Jesus calls Christians to consider even those divided from us by creed or ethnicity or national hostility to be our neighbors who require our care, surely this responsibility extends to the work which marketers do in engaging with people through the electronic connections of social media.
In this paper, we will consider what appropriate neighborliness looks like for marketers using social media. Rather than seeking to articulate some credo of social media marketing for Christians, we will instead explore this question through the theological lens which understands neighborliness as related to the promotion of human flourishing and shalom.[15] In developing our argument, we will turn first to the theology of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). As a Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine has remained one of the most significant influences on the Western tradition of thought across the past fifteen hundred years. He wrote over five million words of text. His impact can be traced across fields as disparate as psychology, political science, philosophy, literature, history, science, law, and, of course, theology. In this paper, we will explore how his psychological discussion of the impact of the desires of the human person on her long-term stability and peace provides a useful viewpoint from which to engage in constructive critique of the ways in which modern social-media marketing disorders our desires and so disrupts our peace. Throughout this paper, we will draw upon various types of works from within Augustine’s vast corpus: from political theory to psychological study to a catechetical formation manual.
In his massive theological treatise reflecting on civic and ecclesial life, City of God (written between 413–426 AD in North Africa), Augustine reflected upon the challenges to Christian theological claims arising from the sack of Rome in 410. If Christianity is true, why did the Roman Empire suffer such a terrible defeat after widespread conversion across the empire? Augustine challenges the implied connection between Christian identity and Roman identity. This leads him to articulate a theological framework for Christian engagement not only in the church and home, but also in the public sphere (the saeculum).[16] Although his primary focus is Christian engagement in politics, his arguments also have great significance for Christian engagement in business. Most importantly, he argues that Christians, the members of the City of God, should not simply abandon the saeculum, but rather in their daily lives should seek to promote shared goods of peace and justice alongside non-Christians, the citizens of the City of Man. Augustine’s descriptions of the proper pursuit of these shared goods have influenced all subsequent theological reflection upon these questions in the Protestant and Catholic traditions of the West. Along with Augustine’s significant general theological impact, we believe his work is particularly useful for this reflection because of his development of the connection between rightly ordered desires and the universal human pursuit of peace. For Augustine, peace has a two-fold nature. In this life, civic peace is constituted by the “tranquility of order,” which provides a “breathing space” from the inevitable bloodshed of life in a broken world.[17] However, Augustine also describes a heavenly peace, for which he believes all creation yearns. “In peace, that is, in heaven, the just in Christ are free from sin and all the anxieties of this life in a perfect social bond of angels and human beings alike for an unending life of the happy vision of God.”[18] While this peace is not obtainable on earth, Augustine believes that we can experience it in a fragmentary fashion through the proper ordering of those desires which distract us from properly pursuing relationship with God. In an industry whose stated purpose is profit through capturing attention by the evocation of desire, we believe that Augustine offers helpful theological resources to confront these moral challenges and questions.
Augustine’s Pursuit of Peace
This search for peace was not simply theoretical for Augustine but deeply personal. In his spiritual autobiography, Confessions (written between 397 and 400 as a relatively new bishop in North Africa), the recently converted Augustine reflects upon his own journey to relationship with God. In the first few books, Augustine focuses specifically upon his own spiritual struggles as a young man. First, he describes the infamous incident of the pear tree, where he and his friends break into a neighboring field and help themselves to the neighbor’s ripe pears.[19] Looking back to his rebellious youth, Augustine realizes that his desires were not actually for the pears. “Those pears truly were pleasant to the sight; but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had abundance of better, but those I plucked simply that I might steal. For, having plucked them, I threw them away, my sole gratification in them being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy.”[20] In the following book, he sees these tumultuous desires influencing his behavior as he pursued further studies in Carthage. Rather than desiring the good, he became consumed with his search to satiate his own sexual desires. “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares.”[21] Although the desires are different in their object (destruction versus sexual satisfaction), Augustine’s concern is the same: his choices were driven by restless and improperly ordered desires rather than a desire for the good. Thus, he was never able to actually experience rest and peace.
Throughout the Confessions, he describes himself as a young man in motion—first across Africa, then across the Mediterranean to Italy, growing from rural provincial to imperial professor of rhetoric. Throughout, he remains an intellectual and spiritual pilgrim, testing out the philosophical schools of the day. The tumultuousness of his longing leaves him exhausted. He describes feeling as if he was “tossed up and down in all beside, faint and languishing with withering cares.”[22] Only after his conversion does he come to understand that true peace is not achieved through success or sexual satiation. Finally, he begins to long to be set free (for true freedom) from the changing desires which controlled him. As he grows as a Christian, Augustine finally realizes that he has misdiagnosed what he is actually seeking: it was not the satiation of physical desires that would ultimately make him happy or fulfilled. Rather, what he had been feeling “was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered; but was without all longing for incorruptible sustenance, not because filled therewith, but the more empty, the more I loathed it.”[23] In book X, Augustine finally finds the peace which he is seeking. It is only when he enters into the fullness of Christian faith that he finds “a secure place for my soul.”[24]
Moving from the personal to the universal, in The City of God, he describes how all men from all cultures desire the same thing that he did: all men desire peace, a “good and a gift of God.”[25] Augustine continues to describe a theory of peace that goes far beyond the political but rather exists at several levels—reflecting the different aspects of the human person. The physical peace of the body—where the body is at rest—“lies in the balanced ordering of parts.”[26] The peace of the “irrational soul” (the concupiscent desires) lies in “the rightly ordered dispositions of the appetites.”[27] The peace of the rational soul (the reason) lies in the “rightly ordered relationship of cognition and action.”[28] The body and soul together are at peace “in the rightly ordered life and health of a living creature.”[29] And, of course, the fullness of the human person is at peace in right relationship with others and ultimately with God. Augustine devotes most of the City of God to exploring the relationship amongst humans and between humans and God. “Peace between mortal man and God is an ordered obedience, in faith, under an eternal law; and peace between men is an ordered agreement of mind with mind.”[30]
All these types of peace are essential for human flourishing. However, they must be properly related. Augustine argues that these more tangible types of peace—peace proper to our embodied existence as beings with bodies living in a society (another type of body)—can only make us actually peaceful if they are ordered in proper proportion to the peace which God gives—“The enjoyment of serene and eternal peace.”[31] If these goods are treated as if they were “the only goods or loved more than the goods which are believed to be higher,” then the peace itself will be destroyed and “present misery will be increased by it.”[32] Augustine’s proper ordering of peace does assume that certain basic needs are met:
temporal peace, in proportion to the short span of a mortal life, consisting in bodily health and soundness, and the society of one’s own kind; And all things necessary for the preservation and recovery of this peace. These latter include those things which are appropriate and suitable to our senses, such as light, speech, breathable air, drinkable water, and whatever the body requires to feed, clothe, shelter, heal or adorn it.[33]
Augustine also argues that for humans the proper life in which to enjoy peace is a “social one.”[34] The peace which we receive from God is not competitive or a zero-sum game in which we win when others lose. Rather, our enjoyment of our peace actually grows when it is shared with others. “A man’s possession of goodness is in no way lessened by the advent or continued presence of a sharer in it. On the contrary, goodness is a possession which is enjoyed more fully in proportion to the concord that exists between partners united in charity. He who refuses to enjoy this possession in partnership will not enjoy it at all.”[35]
Augustine’s call for peace is not simply a late antique rendition of the chorus to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Rather, Augustine argues that one of the conditions for achieving some of the peace we desire is possessing a properly chastened view of the possibility for human achievement of this goal. The more a city grows, the more likely it is to be a victim of its own success: “The larger the city, the more is its forum filled with civil law-suits and criminal trials. Even when the city is at peace and free from actual sedition and civil war, it is never free from the danger of such disturbance or, more often, bloodshed.”[36] Even in our personal relationships, our peace is not assured whether with our family or our friends. Rather than friends guaranteeing security and support, “the more friends we have, and the more places we have them in, the further and more widely do we fear that some evil may befall them out of all the mass of the evils of this world.”[37] On the other hand, given the brokenness and degradation of the people in the world, we can never be perfectly secure in our friendships, as we always have “the much more bitter fear that their friendship will be transformed into perfidy, malice, and wickedness.”[38]
This awareness of the precarious and transitory nature of our peace means that Christians should seek to prioritize achieving peace in the age to come, where we will possess “eternal life made fit for the enjoyment of God and of one’s neighbor in God.”[39] Augustine’s ultimate point is that even a good life is far from the peace of heaven: “our final happiness, our last perfection, a consummation which will have no end.”[40] However, this does not mean that the happy human should disregard the importance of these very basic physical and social goods, but rather should seek to use these goods to achieve some sort of conditional peace and in order to prepare oneself for the true peace in the age to come.
Even with the existential reality that we live in a broken and sinful world, the greatest impediment to achieving true and properly ordered peace is ourselves. Given his own spiritual story, it is not surprising that Augustine devotes significant space to considering the danger of disordered loves to our peace. The first type of disordered love which makes it impossible to find our true peace is pride—the disordered love of self. The opposite of the person properly at peace with God is the homo incurvatus in se—the man so consumed with himself through sin that his body curves in on itself and cannot actually be at peace. The reality is that this curvature—focus on self—is both a result of pride and a cause of pride. Pride makes it impossible for us to experience peace in God because we want to make ourselves little gods instead.
Thus, pride is a perverted imitation of God. For pride hates a fellowship of equality under God, and wishes to impose its own dominion upon its equals, in place of God’s rule. Therefore, it hates the just peace of God, and it loves its own unjust peace; but it cannot help loving peace of some kind or other. For no vice is so entirely contrary to nature as to destroy even the last vestiges of nature.[41]
Augustine expounds at even greater length the way in which disordered desires disturb our peace in his catechetical text, De Doctrina Christiana (written between 397 and 426 in Hippo). In this text, Augustine incorporates many of the insights from his contemporaneous writing on books such as City of God and Confessions into a manual for teaching new Christians in his work as a bishop. Augustine describes the danger of improper self love: when we love ourselves simply for our own sake not as we are related to God.[42] Augustine identifies the danger that in this case, even our enjoyment of ourselves above all other things will be “to some extent defective, because they are better when they cling to the unchangeable good and are tightly bound to it, then when they release themselves from it to cling even to themselves.”[43]
The other dis-orderer of our peace can be our carnal desires—a challenge which Augustine personally knew well. In Augustine’s metaphor of the earthly city in City of God, he returns repeatedly to the question of how we understand the ultimate goal of earthly things: do we desire earthly things in order to help us better to enjoy “earthly peace . . . or eternal peace”? Put another way, do we desire earthly goods in order to temporarily help us satiate our earthly desires through “the satisfaction of our appetites” and the avoidance of death and shunning pain?[44] Or, like those of the heavenly city do we seek goods only in such a way that they are oriented towards eternal peace?[45] This does not mean that the Christian should seek to become a Stoic, to “be neither distressed by pain, nor disturbed by desire, nor extinguished by Death.”[46] Rather, the key question for ordering those desires is figuring out how they should be properly directed to help direct the Christian towards God. “[F]or as long as he is in this mortal body, he is a pilgrim, far from the Lord; and so he walks by faith, not by sight. That is why he refers all peace, whether of body or of soul, or of both, to that peace which mortal man has with the immortal God, so that he may exhibit an ordered obedience, in faith, to the eternal Law.”[47]
In his distinction between use and enjoyment, Augustine describes the difference between enjoyment and use: enjoyment, after all, consists in clinging to something lovingly for its own sake, while use consists in referring what has come your way to what your love aims at obtaining.[48] As exiles on the way to our own country, we are always in danger of coming to love the journey or the mode of transportation instead of the place to which we are heading, so that “we are converted to enjoying what we ought to have been using, and were unwilling to finish the journey quickly, and that by being perversely captivated by such agreeable experiences, we lose interest in our own country, where alone we could find real happiness.”[49] This improperly ordered love is the result of confusing the things which ought to be enjoyed, things which are “eternal and unchanging,” with things which “are to be used.”[50] The person living a truly spiritually peaceful life, therefore, must “be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things; to love things, that is to say in the right order so that you do not love what is not to be loved or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a greater or lesser love for things that should be loved equally.”[51] For example, we disorder our loves, confuse use and enjoyment, and deprive ourselves of eternal peace when we see temporal goods as something to be enjoyed instead of used. People find joy or despair in the having or losing of temporal things. However, they don’t see that in the inordinate love of temporal things they are actually hurting themselves by making it impossible to choose true peace.
For a fish also rejoices when, not seeing the hook, it devours the bait, but, when the fisherman begins to reel it in, at first its entrails are wrenched, and then it is dragged away from all the joy which made it joyful and [is dragged off] to be eaten. So are all who consider themselves happy because of their temporal goods, for they have snatched the hook and gone off with it. The time will come when they will realize how many torments they have eagerly devoured.[52]
In many ways, the great question of our interaction with other humans is whether human beings ought to regard others as things to be enjoyed or to be used.[53] Naturally, this question of use or enjoyment extends to our interactions with other humans who are both potentially the objects of our desire, while at the same time subjects in their own right made in the image and likeness of God.[54]
The answer for Augustine is that in fact other humans are appropriate to be loved because “they can be related to God together with ourselves in a kind of social companionship.”[55] Loving other people in fact protects us from the sin of pride, because “. . . other people are to be loved more than our own bodies, because all these things are to be loved for God’s sake, and other people are capable of enjoying God together with us, which our bodies cannot do, because what gives life to our bodies is our souls, and it is with them that we enjoy good.”[56] One of the greatest hindrances to both appropriately using temporal goods and enjoying others who share in our companionship with God is the danger of covetousness—disordered love of the world and its goods. Augustine feels so strongly about this that he describes how “through covetousness the devil reigns in a person and controls his heart.”[57]
In conclusion, Augustine describes the Christian moral life as characterized by peace arising from properly ordered desires. The great enemy of achieving both the natural and supernatural peace which each person desires and which is necessary to exist in both social and spiritual peace is the proper use of temporal goods and the enjoyment of those goods (other humans) who actually share in our relationship with God.
Social Media’s Role in Disturbing Peace
Augustine’s insights into peace provide wisdom for the field of marketing, which works to create desire for goods and services. Increasingly, social media is the medium of choice for marketers seeking to influence their customers because of its many benefits including specific targeting options, affordability, and flexibility. Social media use in general often creates harm for users based on both how social media platforms operate as well as the content shared with users on those platforms. There are several ways in which social media use disturbs all the types of peace identified by Augustine. Most basically, social media has a unique capacity to destroy peace by generating new desires. As stated above, social media in general and Meta (parent company to Facebook and Instagram) specifically have powerful targeting capabilities in their advertisement platforms. Meta has access to a wealth of information about its users through sources such as the photos a person “likes,” the pages she follows, the images that she looks at longer than others, the tone of her comments, etc. All this information is used by marketers to accurately target potential customers whom the marketers believe will want to purchase their products. It is not uncommon for marketers to advertise something to a user that can meet his needs. However, marketing also depends on the ability to create wants that the user was not previously aware existed. As an example, a male user might like a certain style of clothing but have a hard time finding that clothing in the typical stores he shops in. Using big data, marketers can show him advertisements for the type of clothing he desires to buy from companies that the customer was unable to find on his own. However, the marketing doesn’t stop there. Rather, through targeted marketing, social media can provide advertisements for additional purchases—creating desires well beyond the need which motivated the original purchase.[58] As another example, a study of the five most popular kid-influencer YouTube channels, showed that over 40% of the videos featured food and drink, with 90% showing unhealthy food or drink products that were sponsored by brands. The 179 food and drink videos had more than 1 billion views, likely by children aged 8 and under who are highly susceptible to product placement.[59]
The disturbance of peace may go beyond this disturbance of individuals to a disturbance of the civil order. For example, The Facebook Files was an investigation published by the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2021 based on several leaked internal Facebook documents. These documents provided evidence of the company’s knowledge of the negative impacts of using their platform. One of these negative impacts included human trafficking, which is a disturbance of both individual peace and civic peace.[60]
Additionally, social media use disturbs rational peace (having a rightly ordered relationship of cognition and action) as evidenced by numerous studies that find a link between social media use and mental health issues,[61] a relationship that Facebook is aware of and struggles to control.[62] One specific study found that social media usage is a significant predictor of neuroticism and anxiety one year after use. Additionally, levels of neuroticism and anxiety predicted future social media use implying a possible negative downward spiral linking these two processes.[63] Another study found that a majority of middle schoolers have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction in online settings and tend to believe that things that go viral must be true. This mindset leaves young people poorly equipped to make rational decisions for themselves, including decisions about drug use, risky sexual behavior, or political extremism.[64]
Social media use also disturbs peace among people. Many social media platforms use algorithms that prioritize showing their users those posts that get a lot of comments and interactions. This usually leads to extreme or controversial information being the most visible and can have divisive effects on our society. Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president for user growth at Facebook, expressed concerns about this function of social media stating that “the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.”[65]
Social Media Disorders Our Desires
Social media use encourages disordered desires in a variety of ways. The business model for social media platforms incentivizes companies to gather as much attention from users as possible because user attention can be sold to marketers for profit, constituting 90% of social media revenue.[66] Some argue that social media companies have worked so hard to attract attention from users, that they have actually crossed a line and are now addicting their users.[67] In other words, they have developed a way to make disordering of desires much more permanent.
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, announced at a conference in 2017 that he was “something of a conscientious objector to social media.”[68] He described that the goal of social media apps is to consume as much of people’s time and attention as possible. Social media apps are described as being designed to give people a “Dopamine hit every once in a while” (for example, when a person gets a comment or like on one of her posts).[69] Palihapitiya supports this concern about the dopamine hit given to users and its potential to addict users. He cites this as the reason that neither he nor his children use Facebook.[70]
Although it is not formally recognized as an addiction by psychologists, many researchers have found support for social media addiction (SMA) among users. SMA refers to a state of mind in which people feel a constant pull to monitor their social media existence.[71] SMA has been found to be stronger than addiction to cigarettes or alcohol and is increasing in prevalence.[72] This excessive focus on social media presence is an example of disordered desires as social media content and interactions are typically focused on the self and worldly goods, not the pursuit of God and his goodness. Businesses sometimes contribute to this excessive focus on checking social media. For example, an ad saying “We have a big announcement coming tomorrow” may encourage customers to continually check social media; placing limited-time ads on social media may encourage frequent logging in; and using stories (that disappear after a day) encourages frequent checking of social media.
Social Media Makes Us Proud and Covetous
Social media use has been found to increase self-focus. One study found that when people took photos that they planned to share on social media, they found less enjoyment in their experience and were less engaged with the moment than those who took pictures they planned to keep for their own personal use. Researchers found that taking photos for social media use increases the users’ focus on themselves, distracting them from connecting to the world around them.[73]
Basically, these platforms have been so successful because of pride. The model is based on the idea of a person saying “look at me/listen to me!” and then being affirmed in what they present. The typical content posted on social media shows people putting their best foot forward—showing an ideal life and ideal belongings. These idealized images naturally incite covetousness in users who look around at their own, real, less-appealing lives and want the idealized things they see on social media (this could be physical things, but also ideal relationships, or even ideal emotional experiences).
The Role of Marketers in the Harms of Social Media
In June 2024, United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy urged Congress to enact legislation requiring social media platforms to include a Surgeon General’s warning label on their sites to remind users that social media use has not been proved safe. Murthy’s call to action comes after a statement he made in 2023 stating that the United States is in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis to which he suspects social media has been an important contributor. Murthy was part of a task force created by the Biden administration to increase protection for young people online.[74]
Pressure from government and advocacy groups such as the above example are common, yet alone, they are not enough to make real change. If society desires for social media companies, whose goal is profit, to change the way their platforms operate, then affecting their profit seems the most logical approach to motivate them to do so. Who is better positioned to affect their profit than the marketers who are the source of that profit?
We argue that social media marketers contribute to the harms of social media if they use social media in a passive way—without intentionally trying to counteract the negative outcomes of social media through the use of intentional content/messaging, intentional choice of platform, and advocacy.
Implications for Marketers Engaging in Social Media Marketing
Given the potential harms to society from social media use, some Christians have abandoned social media use altogether. Often Christian marketers are either hesitant to use social media or find they face an inconsistent lifestyle in which they use social media as a marketer because of its many benefits while they don’t personally use it themselves or allow their children to use it because of its potential harms. As discussed above, social media can be and is used by marketers in a way that contributes to human achievement of peace. Because of this, we would encourage marketers not to “abandon ship” and avoid social media altogether. On the contrary, we believe social media marketers can have a positive impact on this fallen aspect of our society through the use of intentional content, intentional platform choice, and advocacy.
Intentional Content
Social media marketers can play a redemptive role in social media and shape its influence to help society achieve peace through the content chosen to be shared on platforms. A helpful guideline that can be used when making content choices is David Hagenbuch’s seven sins of influence.[75] In his book, Honorable Influence, Hagenbuch outlines seven sins of influence that marketers should avoid: deception, coercion, manipulation, denigration, intrusion, encouraging overindulgence, and neglect.[76] Another helpful and simpler guideline is the Golden Rule. Marketers should only share content on social media that they would want to see themselves (or that they would want their grandparents or children to see). Ultimately, marketing messages on social media should encourage people’s achievement of peace by using content that gives people good goods in the right way.
Social media can be a place where the distance and anonymity provided by technology empowers people to use more aggressive and divisive language. Several social media marketers have found a way to curb this and create more positive, encouraging environments through the use of private groups within social media. For example, Apricot Services, a company that manages social media accounts for Christian book authors, regularly uses the strategy of creating private groups of fans of an upcoming book on Facebook.[77] Within these groups, the administrators can more easily manage the tone of posts and comments to create an environment that supports peace among people. As another example, Super Cute Dresses, a mid-size company that makes modest dresses for mothers, sells their dresses through social media, however their page on Facebook is not public. A customer has to request to join their private Facebook group. As part of submitting that request, the customer must acknowledge that they will follow the group rules which include things like being kind and respectful, not posting degrading comments, and avoiding controversial topics. In the rules for the private group, the administrators reserve the right to remove any members who do not comply with these rules.[78] In this way, Super Cute Dresses is able to create a page where customers can search for a niche product they want in an environment that encourages peace among people.
Social media content can also be used to help love other people appropriately. Several organizations with a mission to help and love other people use social media as a tool to help them carry out their mission. For example, Buy Nothing Project, a Benefit Corporation (B-Corp), has a mission to facilitate the “gift economy.” As a certified B-Corp, Buy Nothing Project prioritizes all their stakeholders, not just the owners of the company, and works to produce not only profit, but also benefits for their employees, community, customers, and the environment. Buy Nothing Project uses social media to create local groups of individuals who either give items to a person in need rather than throw them away or ask for items from people rather than buying them new.[79] In one local Buy Nothing group, the administrators organized a Christmas gift exchange where individuals in need ask for help with providing a Christmas celebration for their families. Individuals who want to give sign up to sponsor an individual in need. The exchanges facilitated in Buy Nothing groups on social media are a beautiful example of basic needs being met and peace being enjoyed socially, as users take joy in being able to see the needs of others being met.
Social media content decisions can promote peace through the use of social media to form geographically dispersed affinity groups. These affinity groups can be very niche (for example, a support group for children with alopecia). Marketers who reach out to these groups are able to reach potential customers who could truly benefit from their offering. Marketing through these groups not only allows those who need a company’s offering to find them (possibly allowing them to meet basic needs, which Augustine asserts are critical to the achievement of peace), but also prevents wasting marketing dollars and wasting people’s time with messages that are not relevant to them. In general, the powerful targeting capabilities of social media advertising achieve similar benefits.
Intentional Platforms
While intentional content choice is fairly popular among social media marketers, intentional platform choice is not. One exception to this is Lush Cosmetics who has made an intentional decision to avoid all social media platforms that they believe are harmful to their customers (for Lush, this includes all of them except for YouTube).[80] Mainstream marketing practice encourages marketers to be present on the social media platforms where their target market spends its time and where the company can most easily achieve its goals. It is not common for marketers to consider the characteristics of the platforms they are using and how those characteristics are impacting their audience. Again, McLuhan’s phrase comes to mind; “The medium is the message.”[81] He argued that it was important to study the character of media and how that character impacts society. This point is largely overlooked by social media marketers, but we argue that this is a critical aspect of using social media marketing to help people achieve peace. Not all social media platforms are created equal. Although they tend to have similar operating tools (newsfeeds, buttons for giving responses, notifications for users, etc.), platforms differ in who the typical user is, how long users spend on the platform, and the types of content typically found on the platform. Marketers should consider these differences and choose to have a presence on social media platforms that support peace and rightly ordered loves. The following questions, developed by Risner and Betts, can be used as a guideline for platform selection.[82]
1. “Does the way the platform is created to operate contribute to peace?”[83]
As Augustine described, all men desire peace.[84] This peace involves having peace in the body, the irrational soul, and the rational soul. It also involves peace among people. The things that give us peace should be kept in their proper order, with the peace of heavenly things being held in higher esteem than the peaceful things of earth. We benefit from enjoying peace socially because when we share our peace with others, it grows.[85]
Most social media platforms are created to operate in a way that captures user attention as often and as much as possible. Marketers should consider if a given platform has operating features that are so effective at capturing attention that they become addictive in their nature which harms a person’s ability to achieve peace. Marketers should also consider the extent to which the platform’s algorithm operates in a way that contributes to individual peace as well as peace enjoyed socially. Does it appear that the content the algorithm is programmed to show users is promoting good goods in the right way?
2. “How easy is it for users to participate in the social media platform without being negatively affected by its depravity?”[86]
Augustine warns that the greatest impediment to achieving peace is ourselves. When we have disordered love of ourselves (i.e., pride) we love ourselves for our own sake rather than loving ourselves as creatures made in the image of God.[87] Pride focuses us on earthly things which will never give us true peace. Pride is an expression of depravity. Depravity is also present when individuals seek to satisfy their carnal desires with earthly things (i.e., enjoyment) rather than use earthly things to prepare us for eternal life with God (i.e., use).[88]
Marketers should consider what types of other content are typically posted on the platforms they are advertising on. Users do not have full control of the content they will be exposed to on social media. For example, when scrolling through a news feed, a person will be shown a variety of posts, some of which he/she prefers to see more than others. Marketers can show love to their users by avoiding putting content on social media platforms that are known to show content to users that is harmful to their pursuit of peace. Content that encourages pride or an inordinate love of temporal things disrupts peace. In addition to depraved content, a social media platform may be more prone to divisive comments or toxic interactions between users. These types of platforms should also be avoided.
3. “To what extent does the social media platform exercise care for users?”[89]
If marketers take their responsibility to society seriously, they should choose to engage with their customers using platforms that care for their users. Using Augustine’s insights on human desire for peace, it follows that caring for a person would involve taking actions that point that person toward God for true and lasting satisfaction of desires. It would involve helping others to use the things of this world to prepare for enjoyment of the things of heaven. Caring for users would also mean encouraging people to love one another and avoid covetousness.[90]
One way a social media platform can exercise care for its users is to act responsibly with users’ data. Protecting user data is a way to show love to others by considering the welfare of one of their most important possessions, their personal information. By supporting platforms that prioritize data privacy, marketers can encourage their customers to use platforms that are more likely to keep their personal information safe.
Some social media platforms exercise care for users with platform designs that encourage users to stop scrolling once they are up to date on new content. With this design, platforms increase opportunities for users to engage with others in real-life interactions which are conducive to building community and fostering peace.
It’s plausible that covetousness is more common when users are engaging with social media that are highly visual and social media that is more text-based would be less likely to encourage users to covet. Additionally, certain social media platforms are more likely to have edited/perfected images than others which may encourage more covetousness. Marketers wanting to exercise care for their users by discouraging covetousness may do so by using platforms that are more text-heavy and/or have “unpolished” images as the norm.
Some social media platforms may make efforts to encourage civil discourse and educate users with a balanced perspective on controversial topics. This would help foster peace among people and the love and enjoyment of other people. If there are social media sites showing care to users in this way, it would make sense for marketers to be present on them to show support for those efforts.
Advocacy
In addition to making intentional choices about content and platform selection, social media marketers should act as advocates for the reform of social media. As the funders of social media, marketers have a unique and critical role to play in pressuring social media companies to improve their practices for the betterment of society. Social media marketers should be holding social media companies responsible and talking about the helps and harms of social media in a variety of platforms that could include personal blogs, podcasts, social media posts, local meetings of the American Marketing Association, etc. Marketers at medium to small size organizations could organize into a co-op that has more ad buying power than they would have individually. A co-op like this could create a mission to be responsible in their social media content and platform choices and could call on social media companies to (1) improve their practices and (2) have more transparency related to the answers in our list of questions above.
Advocacy through social media can, at times, be an instrument that helps people achieve peace. A point in favor of this claim is that several companies have used social media to encourage peace through self-moderation of social media use. For example, The Center for Humane Technology is a nonprofit organization focused on technology being developed in a way that cares for the well-being of society. They use social media to promote their message which encourages users to be intentional about their use of social media and also educates users about its potential harms.[91] As another example, every May, L. L. Bean takes a break from all of its social media activities as a way to encourage their followers to become more aware of and invest in their own mental health through time outside.[92] This campaign has a positive tone, focusing on the mental health of its users.
Example Application
As an application example, we will walk through the decision of whether or not a Christian university (or one of its schools, departments, or centers) should promote themselves on TikTok. Christian universities generally have a mission to further God’s kingdom in some way and we assume they would support Augustine’s premise that man’s desire for peace can only be fulfilled by God and would work to support that end. Within Christian universities, there are often schools or centers who are responsible for their own self-promotion who may be trying to create a social media marketing plan that aligns with the university’s mission.
We will examine the platform of TikTok, given its popularity among young people. TikTok was launched in 2017 and currently has over 1 billion active users.[93] TikTok is a significant player in social media with 25.6% of the global population having an account.[94] In the United States, 63% of teenagers use TikTok and 25% of the platform’s users are between the ages of 10 and 19 years old.[95] In the following discussion, we will use the questions provided above to make an argument for whether or not TikTok should be part of the marketing strategy for a school at a Christian university.
First, “Does the way the platform is created to operate contribute to peace?”[96] In our opinion, research into this question brings the use of TikTok into doubt. Studies have found that the algorithm that TikTok employs to serve content to users is very effective in shaping their behavior and increasing their active participation on the platform.[97] TikTok’s successful algorithm is likely a major reason why young people (ages 18–24) spend more time on TikTok than any other social media platform, an average of 76 minutes per day.[98] This algorithm can also contribute to addiction to TikTok, characterized by spending excessive time on the app or being unaware of how long you have been scrolling.[99] Additionally, the algorithms that TikTok uses to feed users content on their “For You Page” shows videos they think their users will like, not necessarily videos that will benefit them.[100] This can have detrimental effects. TikTok has become a popular space for teens to discuss and express their mental health issues.[101] Several studies have found that when users show interest in mental health issues, they are often fed videos related to unrequited love, hopelessness, pain, and suicide.[102] These videos create a loop that users find hard to get out of and several users have expressed feeling stressed and triggered to take negative action because of them.[103] Taken as a whole, these studies provide evidence that TikTok does not appear to show users good goods in the right way.
Second, “How easy is it for users to participate in the social media platform without being negatively affected by its depravity?”[104] We believe this is another concerning area related to the use of TikTok. The TikTok platform operates in a way that immediately starts a new video once one has ended. The videos that are shown to users are based on what the algorithm estimates that the user would like to see, not necessarily what the user has chosen to see or selected to “follow.” Studies have found an alarming amount of sexual content on TikTok including nudity, pornography, sexually explicit content, non-consensual sexual acts, the sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery, and sexual solicitation.[105] Additionally, TikTok has been said to facilitate the exploitation of minors through their live video feature which allows users to create live videos of themselves and receive “gifts” from those who are watching which can be converted into real currency.[106]
Third, “To what extent does the social media platform exercise care for users?”[107] Again, this is an area in which TikTok does not rank well in our opinion. For many years, TikTok has been under attack by the United States Government because its parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese owned (and in part, owned by the Chinese government).[108] United States government officials are concerned enough over user privacy related to the ownership of TikTok that they have banned the use of TikTok on all government issued devices in 39 states.[109] TikTok has responded to this pressure from government officials in the United States by prioritizing transparency.[110] However, concerns still remain related to the amount of data that TikTok collects about their users and a lack of transparency in the data collected.[111] Additionally, a 2024 study of TikTok’s privacy standards found several areas where the company had fallen short of meeting the expectations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) perspective, the privacy and security law passed in Europe in 2018.[112]
We believe that TikTok is also behind others in their industry in efforts that may help users avoid the vice of pride. One of the main ways that social media platforms encourage pride is through the counting of “likes” and other affirmations from other users. The more “likes” a person receives on their post, the more they take pride in themselves and their content. Some social media platforms now offer users the option to turn off the engagement counts that show how many people have liked their posts. Instagram rolled out this option in 2021 in an effort to lower the social pressure that people experience when using the app.[113] TikTok, however, does not currently offer this option.
TikTok does make some efforts to encourage its users to manage the time they spend on the app. It previously offered a feature called “screen time break” that allows users to set a maximum amount of uninterrupted screen time and get a reminder to stop using the app when that time was met.[114] Interestingly, one preliminary study found that users who used the screen time break feature ended up spending more time on TikTok than those who didn’t because the feature makes them more trusting of the app.[115] More recently, in November 2025, TikTok launched a time and well-being space where users can listen to relaxing sounds, complete breathing exercises, and write in an affirmation journal as a way to pursue personal well-being.[116] TikTok’s well-being space replaces the former screen time break, which in our opinion is a move in the wrong direction in the effort to care for users because screen time break would encourage users to get off the app while the well-being space involves staying on the app longer.
The above analysis provides evidence that Christian universities who desire to benefit society in its pursuit of peace and ultimately God, should avoid marketing themselves on TikTok (with either organic or paid promotions). This example shows one way that the questions provided above can be used to guide a marketer’s behavior. Of course, platform choice is just one part of positive action which also includes intentional content choice and advocacy.
Conclusion
Reflecting on the intersection of Augustine’s vision of peace and the realities of social media marketing reveals that the pursuit of peace is both timeless and relevant for our current times. Augustine’s insights remind us that peace is not merely the absence of conflict or the satisfaction of fleeting desires, but the result of rightly ordered loves—where temporal goods are used as means to higher ends, and where our relationships with others are grounded in love and oriented toward the ultimate good. In a world where social media platforms are often designed to capture attention, foster pride, and disorder our desires, Augustine’s call to seek peace through proper ordering of our loves offers a compelling framework for evaluating our professional engagement with these technologies.
While we have focused on the role of Christian marketers in this paper, the call to responsible engagement with social media obviously goes beyond those who are professional social media producers to implicate the users. In his encyclical letter Miranda Prorsus, written in 1957, Pope Pius XII considered the responsibility both of those who produced media (tv, radio, and film at this point) but also the responsibility of the consumer. He reminded his readers that bringing media into their home or life is analogous to the prudential deliberation which involves inviting a friend into our home. Just as we seek to expose our families to those who “encourage truth and goodness, and do not draw members of the family away from the fulfilment of their duty, whether to individuals or to society”, so every person (and especially parents), should carefully consider all media use. [117] The recent Meta lawsuits, with their damning claims regarding the intentional cultivation of disordered desires—especially within children and minors—in order to create more profits, are an indication as to how much of the burden for this type of careful cultivation of proper use remains with the user, even in the face of unjustly exploitative marketing and creation of consumption patterns.[118]
For marketers, especially those guided by a Christian faith, the challenge is to understand their role in the attention economy and take at least partial responsibility for its outcomes. As producers, they bear an even higher moral burden. Marketers can use their influence to promote genuine human flourishing. This involves creating content and choosing platforms that encourage community, truth, and well-being, rather than division, deception, or addiction. It also means advocating for reforms that hold social media companies accountable and prioritizing the care of users as neighbors deserving of love and respect. The work of social media marketing impacts the lives of billions of people on a daily basis and it is a vocation with profound moral implications. By drawing on Augustine’s wisdom, marketers can help shape a digital environment that contributes to peace rather than undermining it.
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[15]. Throughout this paper, we refer to the theological concepts of peace, shalom, and flourishing. Drawing on an Augustinian framework, we see these concepts as interlocking and complementary. Augustine describes a heavenly peace—in which all creation exists in harmony. This is the same concept as the Hebrew concept of shalom. Augustine also repeatedly refers to the peace within a person—in which their desires are properly oriented so that that individual can move towards the vision of God and participate fully in shalom. The state which this properly ordered peace creates within us can also be referred to as flourishing. (For a discussion of the connection between Augustine’s concept of peace, shalom, and flourishing, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008), 227–233. Because marketing exists to stir up desires and therefore impacts our ability to individually achieve peace, we have chosen to focus on peace as the driving concept behind this paper.
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