“Whelp,” my mother began our weekly phones conversation. “Marge and I aren’t speaking.” Marge is one of my mom’s best friends. When she moved houses, Marge showed up with curtains and a lamp and had her grown son heave boxes in from the car. When my mom found herself alone on Christmas one year, Marge set an extra spot at her table.
But here’s the thing: Marge is a Republican. My mom, a Democrat.
This hasn’t mattered for the better part of the last decade. Their friendship is built on warm conversations over lunches, shared confidences, and favors exchanged. But then, several weeks ago, Mom became so outraged by current events that she began posting a series of anti-Trump memes and quotes.
Marge’s daughter commented on a post, saying the sentiments were all lies. Mom responded. The daughter responded. The posts continued and the comments continued. Marge jumped in. And by the end of the string of messages, no one was friends anymore. I’m not talking about Facebook friends — I mean IRL.
My mother isn’t the only person whose real-life relationships with friends and neighbors are fraying as they get into tiffs over political differences on Facebook. Last week, a reader asked me to weigh in on politics and social media friendships. “Please write about people giving up on or blocking others on social media based on political discontent,” she wrote. “We’re getting further and further apart…I’m scared.”
Curious how significant this issue was, I turned to Facebook, asking people to message me with their stories about blocking and unfriending over political differences. To date, I’ve received 94 comments and 20 private messages, from both sides of the divide.
The going emotion was frustration: Nearly everybody reported that they’d blocked, muted, or unfollowed people with extreme — and extremely different — political views. “I never realized how right, racist, and xenophobic people from my Quaker high school could be,” wrote one middle-aged New Yorker. Despite similar sentiments, plenty of people were uncomfortable with blocking or muting commenters. One guy, himself a co-founder of an early social site, wrote: “My issue is that the echo chamber gives me such a tunnel view that I fear I’m not understanding the topics.”
Therein lies the rub. We know our country has become more partisan. We know there are communities of people in the US — on the left and the right — who hold views we don’t get. We crave the empathy that comes with understanding those views. We know the “filter bubble” about which Eli Pariser first wrote back in 2011 is part of the problem—it limits the viewpoints we see to those that reflect the opinions we already have. And yet we double down on that bubble, muting and blocking and unfriending people who think differently from us, if they make it into our social streams at all. We hate ourselves a tiny bit for this. And yet, if we do the opposite — engage on social media with people who hold different viewpoints — it almost always goes sideways. Next thing you know, you, like my mom, aren’t talking to Marge.
It’s too easy here to hate on Facebook — to blame the technology for the problem. Yet Facebook is not without responsibility. Many of our interactions on the site are guided by the subtle (or not-so-subtle) direction of its design, which is, in turn, determined by its business model. The company has honed the software to get us to spend as much time as possible on it—and to provide information about ourselves in the process—so that it can sell more ads. In Menlo Park, the company is scrambling to better navigate the tensions that arise between building a good business and building a socially responsible service.
But we have another option. We can choose to spend less time talking to our friends on Facebook — and more time investing in smaller communities.
Right after the election, Mightybell founder Gina Bianchini took a break from social media. Bianchini has been building social software since the early aughts, and she’s an advocate of all that it can enable. But, she said in a recent talk, “I realized I’d replaced real relationships I cared about with the theater of posting. I actually knew more about the lives of people who posted frequently on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than I knew about the people I truly cared about.” Bianchini later returned to social media, and she’s invested in building social tools that help people gain empathy. She has a smart thesis on the way that software can do this, which you can hear her discuss here.
But I will posit that if you truly want to scale the “empathy wall,” a term Arlie Hochschild introduces in her excellent book Strangers in Their Own Land, get off Facebook and go out into your world. Chances are, you won’t have to go too far. There are Trump supporters in Westchester. There are Democrats in Birmingham. Befriend your neighbors, with no agenda.
Consider this your call to action. There are dozens of ways that you can do this with intention. Some people take a day off social media every week. Others choose not to look at it before noon. Still others strip the app from their phones. The point, however, is not taking time off social media, but rather reconsidering how you use that time. Call the uncle you don’t talk to at the Thanksgiving table, and invite him to a movie. Take your niece hiking. Volunteer at a local school. In the process, seek out the people who are most different from you, in every way, and look for the things you have in common. Connect around common interests and shared passions in real life. Then, when differences of political and social opinions come up, you will have the tools and the trust in place to sit with difference.
That’s what I told my mom, at any rate. And it worked for her. Last week when we spoke, she’d just been down to the store Marge owns. They hadn’t exchanged a message, text, or phones call in three weeks. My mother parked and sat in the lot for a few extra minutes. Then she went inside, and gave Marge a big hug. They caught up. Mom mentioned she was having trouble with her car. Marge sent her husband, who was in the back, out to the parking lot to have a look.
They stood there like that, around the register, while Marge’s husband took a look at my mom’s Jeep. Facebook didn’t come up.
