Goodbye, Kinda, to Facebook
A quick explanation on why I’ve unfriended people and will be stepping away from Facebook for the last 30 days of this election season (and possibly longer).
Frankly, it’s time. For more than eight years, I’ve, for the most part, enjoyed being on Facebook. But during the last year, it has been very discouraging. In fact, the entire “political discussions on social media” thing has become a vast wasteland, in many ways, following the grand political blogosphere of the past, into nitpicking nastiness – or outright insanity – not based on any reality … It was fun, at first, but it’s no longer and since I interact so much with people, the only thing to do is to walk away.
This week, I purged about 200 “friends” from my list so I’m at around 500. Most of you I actually know: You are family, friends and acquaintances, former bandmates, former co-workers, former classmates, people I’ve met as we’ve lived our lives. Most of you have a special place in my heart, I love you, or admire you, and would like to keep it that way; others are just cool people, from all walks of life, that I’ve gotten to know along the way.
The people I’ve removed are people who have passed away and people I don’t really know, a few lurkers including pols who never interact on Facebook, people in the media or bands that I can follow in other places like Twitter, etc. Frankly, I should unfriend many more of you; my wife is always bugging me about this. I also cover some of you as a journalist. But for the most part, there haven’t been any problems. So, I’m not going to do that. I still won’t friend people who are arrested (until it has been resolved) or I work with currently. If you get arrested in the future, I will also, still, unfriend you, until the issue is resolved. This is just a professional policy I have.
If you see that you’ve been unfriended and you want to re-connect with me, let me know and I’ll come to that bridge when I cross it. If you IM, I will answer.
How did I get here?
Let me step back a moment and explain how I got to this point. During the past few years, a couple of my friends have completely gotten off Facebook and I spoke to them about it, so this decision has been swirling around in my head.
My longtime childhood friend, Leo, disappeared from my thread a few years back and I looked for his account and found it had been deactivated. When I saw him at one of my family parties, I took him aside. You’re gone from Facebook… how come? He said, paraphrasing, that after thinking about it, he came to the conclusion that he wasn’t interested in spending any time making Facebook money since that’s all he was doing by being actively involved in the network.
At the time, it hit me like a board; but in hindsight, in made sense; it was brilliant, actually. His wife was still on Facebook and he still answered emails, so all was good. But a lightbulb went off…
A couple of years later, a computer guy I know, Andy, took a 90-day challenge to leave Facebook. He told everyone he was doing it but could be reached on LinkedIn for business stuff. He did, in fact, stay off it; we couldn’t reach him about playing volleyball when we started it up again but whatevah.
Later, after he returned to Facebook for a short time period but left again later. I asked him about the experience and he said it was better for his customers because he actually spoke to people on the phone, had better inactions, etc., with people.
How I got on Facebook
As most people who know me know, I’ve always been a political junkie; it’s my sports. When I first starting blogging in 2002, it was all I would do in my free time. I later ventured over to Daily Kos but after defending Ralph Nader during the 2004 cycle, I was quickly banned. What was billed – and built – as a site about “political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation,” digressed into a “Democrats only” blog after its owner and his friends began to make a lot of money. This was disappointing but again, whatevah. So, I threw myself into my career, continued to play around with radio and musi, and later, started a family (which you all know takes a lot of your free time …).
But I still needed that outlet to debate politics and public policy somewhere since I wasn’t on talk radio any longer, wasn’t on Kos or other sites debating, etc. So when it became a work requirement to get a Facebook account, I did, even if I preferred Twitter. During that time, it’s been relatively fun but, to be honest, a big time suck. I just don’t have the kind of time to interact with it any longer even though I’ve enjoyed it for the most part.
2016 election
During the last year, Facebook has, frankly, become unbearable in many ways.
This has been bipartisan although the desire to target and silence and attack anyone who disagrees with you is coming more from the liberals than the conservatives to the point of ridiculousness. It’s like they learned from the bullying that occurred during the post-9/11 era and are using it to drag us to communism (defined: a political theory that advocates class warfare and leads to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs). You can’t question anything. And what is so disappointing about this is that politically, I’m a “liberaltarian” – a person who believes in both liberal and libertarian policies; I rarely vote for Republicans and have never been one (I may get deeper into this in the future, especially on public policy, but not now). But the Democrats are becoming crazy like the Republicans were doing the War on Terror.
I tried unfollowing people, but that didn’t work. I would then go back and search for people who I knew were putting up interesting things that I wanted to read and interact about. It sucked more time away.
The last mental straw came at the end of August – campaign crunch time; people are starting to pay attention – when on more than one occasion, my interactions with people who I thought were friends – and I mean people I really knew, not just people who like what I do or were friends of friends who I agreed to like on Facebook – were simply toxic. I won’t get in to every example but it was surprising to me.
There was one guy who wrote at least two or three times, “If you are thinking about voting for racist Trump, unfriend me now.” Seriously, dude? I haven’t had a single conservative or Republican friend say to me, “If you’re thinking of voting for Crooked Hillary, just unfriend me.” We can’t survive as a nation this way; we have to accept that there are others who don’t believe the same things.
Then there was the artist I used to work with, someone I admired, who went on this rant about how men who don’t support Hillary are misogynists and hated women because Hillary didn’t stay home and bake cookies. When I countered that I couldn’t vote for Hillary because I met her, knew what was in her core, but was not a misogynist because I had supported numerous female candidates in the past – with money, time, and sweat – and was even asked by Jill Stein to be her running mate in 2002 but declined because I was growing my journalism career, I was met with derision and she scoffed at my “career.” I was, frankly, shocked by this.
No, I don’t work for the New York Times and I haven’t won a Pulitizer. But I have numerous local media awards for political coverage, analysis, education reporting, print design, a right-to-know investigation, an IAFF (firefighters) media award, as well as a third place win for best weekly newspaper in New England and two best news website awards in New Hampshire. In other words, I do have a career, I’m pretty good at it, and anyone else would be just as proud of the body of work. I never attacked her for being an “artist” even if she was actually a store clerk making art that no one wanted to purchase. I was always supportive – she was great at what she was doing. I countered on her thread some of my career highlights … yeah, I have a journalism career … and I was attacked again for “self-grandizing” (sic), and then her friends piled on, too, saying that I was in denial of my gender bias. Seriously? See ya. And again, this is someone I’ve admired and known since the early 1990s.
OK, so …
If you’ve read this far, you can see how I’ve come to this decision. The plan is to not post anything about politics until after the election. I may get off Facebook entirely after that, I don’t know. It’s an experiment. It’s worth a try.
In closing, I will say what I always say to people: Do your research, look at all the information, and then, vote for the person you want to vote for. The only wasted vote is one that is not cast. Good luck!