For years I have had friends and acquaintances on my Facebook account, without ever realizing who they really are, or what they were truly about.
Many of them lie dormant for months, only poking their heads out over the social parapet occasionally, to repost a Minion picture with an inspirational quote, or invite me to play Farmville. (No, I don’t want to play, Jessica. Now f*ck off.)
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They could be high school friends or second cousins that you haven’t seen since you were ten. Perhaps it’s one of those guys you met when you were backpacking through Europe, who added you as a friend, moments before the first round of flaming Sambuca’s began. Just as an example, of course.
We all have our reasons for adding or not adding the people Facebook refers to as our ‘friends’.
But that doesn’t mean their bigoted opinions don’t exist.
Lurking behind innocuous engagement pictures and status updates about half-completed Christmas shopping, are worrying opinions about Syrian refugees and gun control.
All it takes is one global atrocity to bring the racists and the bigots crawling out of the woodwork, and the terrorist attacks in Paris did exactly that. What was once a snide comment about immigrants, a sly share or like to a racist Facebook page, suddenly became a downright tirade against the Muslim population we ‘must’ crack down on.
Our gut reaction was to recoil in horror. Who is this monster? Did he always have these terrifying views and attitudes? And why is she posting this vile nonsense on my feed?
So if you want to unfriend them, I understand. Go ahead. I don’t blame you. The truth is, they’re probably not your ‘real’ friend anyway.
But I won’t.
Not because it makes me any less mad to see an old acquaintance, a former work colleague, or someone I considered a pal, spout hate about a religious group. Not because I agree with them, or even pity them.
I won’t cull the haters because I think they serve as an important reminder for me that people, and opinions like that, still exist. There are actual real world people behind the statuses. They are in their homes, they are logged into Facebook, and they are frustrated. And it really is their world as much as it is mine.
In theory, this should be true of the whole of social media. People you know – well, or not so well – are free to add you and then tweet about whatever the hell they want. If anything, my open-door policy on Twitter and Instagram (in my quest for followers), leaves me wide open to any idiot who wants to wax lyrical on any issue – racist or otherwise.
And yet the rest of social media doesn’t have this problem in nearly the same volume. For whatever reason (maybe 140 characters is just not enough to express racial intolerance, or maybe I’m just not following the right/wrong people) I don’t seem to see the same sort of openly racist rants anywhere other than Facebook. As a result, my other channels of social media are just echo chambers, perpetuating my beliefs, my likes, and my dislikes, over and over again.
I could listen while people regurgitate my opinions, patting me on the back, and commending me on a terribly profound idea (or posting ‘heart eyes’ on every selfie, for that matter). But then what? If everyone agrees with me, my work here is done. If I only surround myself with people who concur, and never think outside my worldview, it doesn’t make the problems go away. It just means that I am wearing blinders.
Deleting a friend from Facebook, who expresses an opinion that is not in line with my own, is the equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears, and going la la la la la.
I wouldn’t do it in real life, so why should I do it online.
And while I’m not encouraging anyone to get into Facebook comment debates with every a**hole who opens their mouth on the wrong side of racism, it’s sometimes worth paying attention to who those a**holes are, and reminding yourself that your social media world is not as separate from the real world as you might have hoped.
We’re all in this together, whether we want to be friends about it or not.
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