The Bible has always warned its readers about the futility of engaging with a fool. “Answer not a fool according to his folly,” warns Solomon, “lest you be like him yourself” (Proverbs 26:4). Where you think your wisdom may make the fool better, it’s more likely that his folly will make you worse. You are more likely to stoop to his level than he is to rise to yours. Ironically, fools can be clever at times and wise men naive, for the fool has an intuitive understanding of how to make you behave like him.
What God inscripturated, X has algorithmized. What God describes as a bug within sinful humanity has been baked in as a feature of social media. Social media rewards the very thing the Bible warns about—it rewards answering a fool according to his folly.
I do not spend a lot of time on X, but when I do, I’m always surprised by how much foolishness I see. I don’t follow fools, so why do I see them on my For You feed? The answer, of course, is that the people I follow have engaged with them, and the algorithm has calculated that I would like to see these interactions. This means that good people have broadened the reach of bad. Wise men have elevated the platform of fools. And they have done so by the simplest of transgressions: answering those fools according to their folly.
I understand why people do this. They may think they can actually help those fools, as per Proverbs 26:5, which says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” They may think they are helping to warn others about deceivers, wolves, or false teachers. And I suppose many of them understand that their own platform will grow through negative interactions more than positive, that the algorithm will reward them more for engaging with fools than with wise people, and more for contradictions than affirmations.
Yet as these people elevate themselves, they also elevate the fools. This is not like a system of weight and counterweight in which, as one rises, the other necessarily falls. No, these rise together, so the fool grows the reach of the wise man and the wise man grows the reach of the fool. Social media offers twin powers: The power of having a voice yourself and the power of giving a voice to others. Both must be stewarded with the greatest of care.
Often, the only effective way to defeat the fool is to ignore him altogether.
I affirm that the church would be far better off if some of the fools who claim to speak for her were silenced. But many of the attempts to silence them actually amplify them, which means that each of us must think carefully about what we say and who we say it about. Each one of us must know when it is better to say nothing at all, understanding that to speak is to elevate and to engage is to amplify. Often, the only effective way to defeat the fool is to ignore him altogether.
I have no doubt the day will come when the Lord will ask each of us to give an account for the ways we used social media. Many of us will need to answer for misusing it in such a way that we gave a voice to those who were not worthy of it. We will need to explain why we neglected his plain instruction that we refuse to answer a fool according to his folly and, in that way, why we helped that foolishness reach a far greater audience.
