I have some pretty clear rules for my Facebook friend list. I’m not interested in winning a numbers contest. I want high quality Facebook friends and I don’t care much about quantity. What does quality mean to me? It means adding value. Provoking my thinking. Sharing useful information with me. Connecting me to social occurrences I care about. Engaging me in some discussion.
The rules aren’t the same for everyone. If you’re a real friend in the physical world then you are automatically eligible to be a Facebook friend regardless of your contribution to my life on Facebook. But if you’re not, you can still be a Facebook friend – even a very valuable one. I have met several folks through Facebook and I cherish my relationship with them because it adds to my life.
Today, though, I de-friended someone that I consider a real friend in the offline world. She committed what I consider a cardinal offense. She shut down a controversial conversation and deleted my post and another’s post from her wall. She had her reason. She considered what I wrote inappropriate. Obviously, I disagree with her perspective on what I wrote. But I can live with that. In fact, I love these disagreements. This is, I think, the primary value of Facebook – connecting people to other people and their ideas, thereby broadening our minds. Her “crime” wasn’t that she disagreed with me. That’s no crime. Her crime was that she shut down a conversation she didn’t like. Of course it’s her wall and she has every right to do so. But it’s a bit dictatorial. It’s trying to control the conversation. And none of us get to control the conversation anymore. Trying to do so is backward. But more importantly to me, it subverts what I consider to be the purpose of social networking – expanding our minds.
There are circumstances in which I would delete posts. Use an egregious racial, ethnic, homophobic or other slur on my wall and I will likely delete your post. And I would delete a post that advocated the mass extermination of some innocent group of people or some other hideous crime. Heck, I would delete a post if it advocated nearly any crime. But controversial opinions? Nope. I encourage those. Yeah, you probably could get your post deleted if you went out of your way to be an ass about it. But my filter is not strict. I believe it is important that we all communicate – especially when we disagree.
She had every right to delete this conversation. And I had every right to exclude her from my list of friends. These are not the people with whom I want to associate on Facebook.
And so it goes…
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
since she’s not your friend anymore, you should really tell us the conversation…
The conversation wasn’t particularly interesting. It was of a political nature and I really don’t like to get into politics on this blog. But Facebook is a place for these conversations. I wish she hadn’t been opposed to open discussion. I think I’d still consider her a friend. But not on Facebook.