Pope Francis doesn't preach only at St. Peter's Square. He uses the town square of Twitter and other modern media methods, including video appeals such as last Saturday's call for for peaceful measures in geopolitics and economic fairness.
"We must adapt our socio-economic models so they have a human face, because many models have lost it," the pope tweeted, using separate missives to implore reform of "big" pharmaceutical and food manufacturers, agricultural, mining and financial firms, as well as the arms industry.
Notably, he tripled the tweets regarding media and technology, including appeals on online educational access, "post-truth, disinformation, defamation, slander and that sick attraction for scandal and that they seek to contribute to human fraternity," and for "technology giants to stop preying on human weakness, people's vulnerability, in order to make a profit."
It's uncertain whether the tech giants will hear and heed the papal prayer. And it's not even certain how responsive they soon will be to governments. In fact, according to a compelling commentary from Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, "States have been the primary actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. That is starting to change, as a handful of large technology companies rival them for geopolitical influence.
"The aftermath of the January 6 riot serves as the latest proof that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are no longer merely large companies; they have taken control of aspects of society, the economy, and national security that were long the exclusive preserve of the state. The same goes for Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. Nonstate actors are increasingly shaping geopolitics, with technology companies in the lead. And although Europe wants to play, its companies do not have the size or geopolitical influence to compete with their American and Chinese counterparts."
In a related conference call with reporters this week, Bremmer brought up some of the same multinationals invoked by the pope, saying they said "exist in and exert power in physical spaces" where they're regulated effectively or ineffectively or capture the regulatory process.
But with technology companies, Bremmer said, "the digital space that they operate in is a space that they actually have sovereignty over. Because they created the architecture from scratch, they create the rules and norms, they control the algorithms."
Bremmer brought up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a MAGA mob as an example of tech independence. The response, he said, "was largely abdication and fragmented failure from the U.S. government, whether the judiciary, the executive, or Congress, but there was quite a bit of response, significant response, from technology companies in a few ways," citing Apple and Amazon's de-platforming of Parler, a social-media site that hosted a growing online congregation of extremists, as well as Facebook's and Twitter's de-platforming of then-President Donald Trump. And arrests, attested Bremmer, were largely a consequence of people posting their participation in the attack on social media.