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What are some good arguments for getting a Facebook?

Is it worth getting into political arguments on Facebook?

  • I have this friend, we've known each other since we were five and I see her every time I go home. She helped me deal with my abusive ex and recently attended my grandad's funeral which was a difficult time. It's all good until she writes offensive, provocative stuff on FB and I feel like I don't know this person. Do I brush it to one side or engage with it? How would you deal with this? (N.B. I normally live in a totally different continent from her, so this is a long-distance setup, we haven't lived near each other for fourteen years). She's been a great support to me and we had a TON of fun times together as teenagers. So it's all good until I check FB in the morning. Lately she's been posting a lot of racist/homophobic/politically insensitive statuses, and they are SO offensive it's hard not to respond. The last ones was: "There are some people who really need to get over their sexuality. If you're gay, you're gay! If you're straight, you're straight! If you're bi, you're just bloody greedy like me ;) But stop going on like the world owes you something just because of who you choose to be intimate with. If you face homophobia then hold your head high but don't get all up in the faces of the people who don't actually care who you nosh just to highlight the fact, for the millionth time this week, you are gay. Sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of, but it is also nothing to be proud of either. You didn't achieve your sexuality, it wasn't awarded for good womb behaviour. So find something you should genuinely be proud about and I would be happy to see people bragging about that!" The one before that was her rejoicing over preventing a Pakistani woman from getting at job at her company by arguing in favour of the white guy because '[racial slurs] are a pain in the arse, they don't join in, they can't go drinking and they don't speak english at work, you never know what they're saying about us." There's a lot of stuff about benefit scroungers too, which I don't understand because she herself was off work on disability with depression for three years (?) When I see this stuff I just despair. These opinions (and her actions at work) are actively lowering the quality of life for quite a few of my friends as well as members of my own family. They are SO offensive to me it plays on my mind for hours after I see them! So my question is, what is the best plan of action here? Hide her posts but remain friends? Just ignore it, don't take the bait? (Her friends give her opinions a lot of support, she doesn't seem to be ruffling feathers by saying this stuff in her friendship group). Point out the flaws in her arguments in a polite way in the hopes of change, or will that lead to defensiveness and re-inforcing of her position? Does any good ever come of arguing on Facebook?

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    My question is, why is she like that? I have this friend I grew up with (also bi, relevant later) who has been teetering on the edge of the libertarian fringe for about ten years now. She is a little isolated now from everyone but her family members (who have the same politics), and most of her online circle is made up of people who agree with her opinions and theories. The thing is, she had a very very rough upbringing in our town. She had a very difficult, stressful home life with very little money, in our affluent upper middle class town. She was treated by many of our classmates and their parents as an unwanted outsider with little value, who didn't belong. Her parents were excluded by the other parents. She was heavily bullied. She was a very smart girl with some anger//explosiveness and a lot of problems fitting in. So now she's found a group of people who don't judge her, in fact they readily relate to her and they appreciate having her with them. And uh, these people are really into guns. So from time to time I will see statuses that make my jaw drop, like, "Don't want me carrying my gun with me when I visit your home? Then don't fucking invite me. Asking me to leave my gun at the door is just like asking a gay person to leave their sexuality at the door. It's just as closed-minded, offensive, and bigoted. And I am sick of these stupid sheeple scared of their own shadows judging me, and rejecting me for being who I am! " And then I see a string of comments from her libertarian friends whole-heartedly agreeing and saying the same thing!! Yeah, so what do I do? She's unabashedly bi and has taken some shit for that over the years, so I feel like she has to know better. But at the same time, I feel like I am kind of one of her last links to the mainstream world. If I shun her, then she really will be completely surrounded by her own echo chamber of people who will just agree with her, and that will just keep solidifying and it will be that much harder for anything to pierce through that worldview. I do not think it's a good thing for her to stop getting reality checks. So I feel like the best thing for me to do is just be a gentle link back to the mainstream for her. I feel like I know how to respond to her in a way that might not be immediately discounted, because I understand why she says these kinds of things. She really has spent a lot of time in her life being attacked, judged, and rejected. I feel like I can say some things that she won't take that way, that are also very logical, that also challenge her. I don't do it every time I see a whopper of a status like that, because I would drive myself nuts, but sometimes I do, and sometimes I just ignore them. I'm not going to stop being her friend over it, though.

everydayanewday at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Also, about this one: Does any good ever come of arguing on Facebook? It's never happened over Facebook or about anything political, but I've had a bunch of times in my life when I opened my mouth and expressed a really stupid opinion that I saw nothing wrong with, and had friends react in disbelief or horror. I still had this vivid memory of being 16, and I was telling one of my friends about something ... not nice that I was thinking of doing, and she just looked at me in a pained way and said, "Don't be that person." It really brought me up short and made me immediately check myself, and we never talked about it again but my opinion completely flipped around in that instant. So I think when it comes to topics that nobody has ever challenged this person on before, that it might not even occur to this person that their friends could feel really differently about it, it can be pretty effective to say how you feel.

cairdeas

Is it ever worth arguing on facebook? No.

ablazingsaddle

A few months ago I encountered a similar problem with a similar friend, and I took the, "OMG I AM SO EMBARRASSED FOR YOU WHEN YOU SAY RACIST STUFF" tack: "Friend, I love you, and I enjoy hearing what you have to say about a lot of different topics. I cannot stand when you make racist comments and use racial slurs against people you and I know and I'm sort of at my wit's end about it because not only am I offended by what you say, I'm also really embarrassed about it because I'm so disappointed to be discovering that someone as wonderful as you could even remotely entertain these horrible, horrible things as being true. You are so much better than this kind of stuff, and when you say racist things, I have a hard time believing that you're the same person I've been friends with for all these years. It's like you're hell-bent on misrepresenting how awesome you are. Racist people aren't awesome though. Stop saying that stuff, okay? Don't say it on FB, don't say it in real life, don't believe it, don't spread it around." And if your friend says no, drop her. Racist people are a waste of time and energy. YMMV.

These Birds of a Feather

My policy with people being terrible on Facebook is to call them up on the phone and have a civil, loving conversation with them. Facebook is an absolutely terrible venue for arguments - one-on-one conversation can potentially make someone see the human hurt that is caused by their words. When people argue in public, they tend to just get entrenched in their opinions.

jennyjenny

It's not homophobic to say "I don't care about whether you're straight or gay, and I don't care at all about your problems." (Which basically sounds to me like what she is saying.) It's a bit callous and certainly not compassionate, but compassion for strangers isn't always an evolutionary advantage. In fact, in some cases, it can be decidedly disadvantageous. Your friend sounds like she has had a hard life: how often have people shown compassion to her? If your expectation is that she has to show compassion to the rest of the world without any expectation that the rest of the world returning it, then from her perspective you're basically telling her that you refuse to be her friend unless she becomes a sucker who is willing to be taken advantage of. That will not end well. I recognize your friend's behavior because I had a similar upbringing growing up poor and in a bad neighborhood, with a sociopathic dad. Consequently, feeling compassion for a stranger is not something that triggers automatically for me - it is a conscious decision I make after making a quick evaluation of that person's potential threat level and also the likelihood that they would feel compassion for me in similar circumstances. I know that the Golden Rule is supposed to be "Do onto others as you would have them do onto you," but for people who grow up worried about their survival the rule often changes into "Do onto others as you suspect they would do onto you." If you show her that the world is a loving place, then she will slowly become more loving. But if you just tell her that she needs to become more loving, then she will probably react negatively. Also, when you argue politics with a friend, always do it in person. It makes it easier for you to see when they're getting upset so you can de-escalate as needed.

wolfdreams01

Wow, everydayanewday. My friend left school at 17 (she did get her GED eventually and attended a semester or two of community college, but that's it) and she married at 20. The irony is, before she married her husband, whose politics were... (guess...) she was toying with the idea of becoming an ultraconservative Catholic, something that her parents were decidedly not! The love of her life had been a nice little Catholic boy from an upstanding family who rejected her for the nice, pretty little Catholic girl from an upstanding family who he idolized. My friend wanted to be respectable. She wanted to be respectable in the eyes of society at large and differentiate/distance herself from those who society deems not to be respectable. It was kind of etched into her psyche that to be a conservative Catholic was to be unassailably respectable. It is terrifying to be on the receiving end of shunning from society, especially at a young age. It can turn you into a kind of desperate person, scratching at any way to survive, reaching for anything that might help you protect yourself, because you realize that if you're a pariah, people will watch you be harmed and they will do nothing to help. It can seem kind of ironic when someone who has experienced that is now shoving other people to the bottom, but I think sometimes it comes from deep terror. It's not that it makes it okay, I just think if you can recognize if it's happening that makes it easier to try to do something about it. If there is any healthy way you can help build up your friend's sense of worth and belonging within mainstream society, she might gradually start feeling less of a need to shove others down. I think you might be able to help her find ways to belong and feel good without putting down other people.

cairdeas

Arguing on Facebook is not likely to do a damned bit of good, no. I'd just hide her and if she for whatever reason asks why you didn't see something of hers, say "Oh, you post a lot of political stuff that I don't want to see, if you need to send me something just email me." But she probably won't, because people generally don't pay *that* much attention. If you really want to address her opinions, do it to her face or in private - i.e. email - not in what is essentially a public venue in front of all of her friends. No one reacts positively to being called out in public.

restless_nomad

aniola

Gay thing - say nothing, you can't make someone not homophobic via a facebook argument. Anecdote about racist action she specifically took, accompanied by racial slurs and bigotry - "Wow. That's really fucked up." No more, no less, no long speil trying to change what a bigot she is. For the welfare stuff I'd be tempted to call her on it, but I will admit I'm not always the best behaved on Facebook. Frankly, after seeing several things like this from her, I'd be tempted to hide her activity entirely, or just unfriend her. It sucks, I guess, but do you really want to be friends with someone like that? This seems like it goes beyond politics you disagree with, and beyond the horrid trend for liking gross stuff on facebook or posting/sharing awful things, straight up to her bragging about what a bigot she is out and about in her everyday life. I have an uncle who lives overseas, and whose political beliefs are the polar opposite of mine. In the interest of being in touch with him at all, I tolerate his activity on my wall (though I hide it during elections) and don't start fights. However, he tends to add inflammatory comments to every liberal thing I post. Recently he posted some openly bigoted comments about Muslims on some of my posts, which I deleted and then sent him a note saying "Sorry I had to delete your thing, but I have Muslim friends and I won't have them seeing that garbage on my wall." He didn't take that well, to say the least, and next time I'll probably delete without explanation. I wish I had the nerve to delete/block him entirely, but he's family. What can you do?

Sara C.

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