The Pope urges Catholics to flock to Twitter
Pope Benedict XIV may be one of Twitter's recent and most surprising converts. — Today, he asked Catholics to spread the word on Twitter and other social networking sites like Instagram and Tumblr to convert atheists to the faith, 140 characters at a time.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Vatican’s posture has moved from warning that internet use can produce solitude among users to actively using social platforms for religious communication. Benedict’s first tweet in December 2012 established Twitter as an official channel; this appeal asks Catholics to make that channel participatory rather than broadcast-only.
The message traveled broadly across technology and general-news outlets, underlining the significance of a major religious institution treating Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr as venues for organized outreach.
First-order effects
- Catholics are being asked to use Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr as channels for direct faith-based outreach, expanding the audience producing religious messages beyond official Vatican accounts.
- Twitter gains another high-profile institutional use case centered on short-form public communication, following Benedict’s first tweet.
Second-order effects
- Instagram and Tumblr are positioned alongside Twitter for the same outreach task, encouraging religious communicators to adapt messages to text, image, and multimedia posting formats.
- Twitter’s role as a communications platform broadens as prominent institutions use it for audience-building, alongside its push toward media-oriented features such as Discover.
Third-order effects
- If institutions continue to mobilize their own communities on social platforms, platform influence will depend not only on publishers and celebrities but on organizations that can activate distributed member networks.
- The shift raises the stakes of platform governance: services invited to host institutional outreach must also manage the content and conduct disputes that accompany mass participation.
The trend: Social platforms are becoming infrastructure for institutions to turn established offline communities into distributed public communicators.