Pope Francis has warned against the increasing narcissism and “spirals of hatred” found on social media networks, encouraging people to cultivate community in their internet interactions. In his World Communications Day message, published on January 25, Pope Francis said that online discussion is “too often based on opposition to the other.”

“We define ourselves starting with what divides us rather than with what unites us, giving rise to suspicion and to the venting of every kind of prejudice (ethnic, sexual, religious and other),” Francis wrote.

This creates a digital environment that nourishes “unbridled individualism which sometimes ends up fomenting spirals of hatred,” he explained.

“As Christians, we all recognise ourselves as members of the one body whose head is Christ. This helps us not to see people as potential competitors, but to consider even our enemies as persons,” he said. “We no longer need an adversary in order to define ourselves” because in “the all-encompassing gaze we learn from Christ” our identity and our relationship in communion with others, he explained.