Facebook wants the Pope to put up an official page. In fact, they want it so much they sent a delegation to try and argue him into joining. But Pope Francis is having none of it. Why? Because people on Facebook are awful.
The Catholic Church, for obvious reasons, dislikes it when somebody tells the Pope to go f*** himself. And apparently, that’s enough of a problem on Facebook that the Pope thinks it’s just not worth it:
Abusive comments can be easily ignored on Twitter but are more prominent on Facebook. [Archbishop Claudio] Celli said the Vatican already spends a lot of time “cleaning up” the Facebook pages for News.va, the church’s news site, deleting obscenities but letting polite criticism stand. He said it wasn’t worth doing the same thing for a profile or page in Francis’s name.
I wonder if the Pope just made his IT guy an archbishop, or if they made an archbishop get an MSCE or something? Anyway, Celli actually has a pretty good point: There are few filters on Facebook, and you generally have to block users or manually delete comments. Twitter does have the same problem, but it’s a lot easier to hide those @replies written by a drunk or a college freshman ready to take down the Pope using his extensive knowledge of religion gathered from Reddit.
Most of us don’t care, because really, watching a seventeen-year-old have a profane meltdown warms our black, empty hearts. But we guess the Pope is slightly more generous and loving towards his fellow man.
Facebook does offer a profanity filter, but there’s nobody more creative than the troll. We doubt the filter is tripped when you post “HAIL SATAN” followed by a string of Slayer videos, for example. So, for now, the Pope will just have to stick to Twitter.