Facebook Without Sin

One of the things I've always found bizarre about many evangelical Christians is that they insist on creating their own inferior copies of popular culture that are supposedly more "pure" in some fashion. This is especially true with music, to the extent that "Christian music" has essentially become a joke, but it extends to other forms of media as well. And now, apparently, this trend is being extended into the realm of social networking.

A group of evangelical Christians in Brazil have created a social networking site called Facegloria that they are billing as "Facebook without sin." So, in effect, it's a place to hang out online free from anything remotely resembling violence, titillation, swearing, and pretty much anything that makes life even marginally edgy and/or interesting. Anything related to gay rights is banned on the site, and I imagine any reference to non-Christian religions will be as well - since the mere existence of such seems to mortally offend these folks.

Brazil's Facegloria is currently only available in Portuguese but other language services and a mobile app are also planned. Brazil has the world's largest Roman Catholic population. "On Facebook you see a lot of violence and pornography. That's why we thought of creating a network where we could talk about God, love and to spread His word," web designer Atilla Barros told AFP. Gay material is also banned from the social media platform.

Mr Barros and his three co-founders were working in the office of Acir dos Santos, the mayor of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, when they came up with the idea. Mr dos Santos has since invested $16,000 (£10,000) in the start-up. "Our network is global. We have bought the Faceglory domain in English and in all possible languages. We want to take on Facebook and Twitter here and everywhere," he said.

Facebook does have a lot of issues with privacy, and many authors like myself are unhappy about how page reach has been throttled down in order to force people to pay for "promotion" and ads - which, by the way, hardly ever generate sales, in case you were wondering. At the same time, though, a number of alternatives have come and gone, unable to generate the critical mass of users necessary to sustain a truly alternative network.

I expect that this effort will attract a lot of evangelicals and hardly anyone else, since the sanitized world of the "true believers" also happens to be incredibly dull. But at the same time, that may very well be just how they like it. Personally, I think its great. If the Poor Oppressed Christians and their supporters start gathering in one place online, that makes it easy for people like me to avoid.