Liberals more likely to unfriend you over politics

[{ Emilia }]

... or do we (Liberals) just have a more diverse environment?

A recent Pew Research study (this is the Washington Post's take on it) had some interesting results.

1) Apparently Liberals are more likely to unfriend you over politics.

Consistent liberals were the most likely group to block or unfriend someone because they disagreed with their political postings, with 44 percent saying they had "hidden, blocked, defriended, or stopped following someone" on Facebook due to their political postings. Only roughly one-third (31 percent) of consistent conservatives had done the same -- although this might be attributable to lower levels of ideological diversity in their online ecosystem.

Which I can sort of understand. I've done it myself. I just don't always have time for views that I consider hateful or bigoted.

But why do Conservatives not unfriend Liberals?
Hm, maybe because:

2) They live in a Conservative echo chamber. Apparently their environments are less diverse and Conservative thought is more hegemonic.

Those that Pew describes as "consistent conservatives" are twice as likely as the average Facebook user to say that posts about politics on the social network are "mostly or always" in line with their own views, according to a survey the organization performed this spring — with 47 percent saying their views dominate the conversations they see.

And to sum it up:

And that conservative echochamber isn't limited to conservatives' online interactions: It's a reflection of the lack of ideological diversity in their real life relationships. Two-thirds of consistent conservatives told Pew that most of their close friends share their views on government and politics, compared to just over half, or 52 percent, of consistent liberals. For mostly conservatives, 42 percent of their close friends have the same views, while just 26 percent of mostly liberals respondents who said the same.

What are your views on this? Have you unfriended (online or offline) somebody over politics before? What exactly was it that made you do it?
Do you think there's a difference between what liberals and what conservatives do in that regard?

Do you live in an echo chamber? This somewhat ties in with what people call the "query logic" of the internet. You only find what you actually look for so you're bound to find more sources that reinforce your own points of view compared to those that challenge it.
What do you do to get out of that echo chamber?

Or is the opposing side so batshit crazy that there's no point anyway?

And to get out of the echo chamber I figured I'd post this here in Misc and not in The Liberal Zone.

 

[MacLeod]

Doesn't this all depend on what you mean by Liberalism and Conservatism as depending on where you live they have different meanings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism


And why would you unfriend someone just because they don't share your political viewpoints, or does this differ from country to country depending on how polarised they electorate is, i.e in countries with 3 or more major parties is it less of an issue?

 

[{ Emilia }]

The definition of liberalism and conservatism obviously depend on where you live. And the US doesn't use the same definitions for "Left" and "Right" either (considering liberalism here in Europe can be both). I'm well aware of these differences (major in political science, ugh) but I don't think they're that important for the purpose of this thread.

The study is American so obviously they were using American definitions. But "unfriending somebody over politics" is pretty universal.

And people can just explain their own views/situation in their replies.

 

[Mary Ann]

It depends on the form of conservatism. If the person is racist, sexist, homophobic and the like I don't want to deal with them. However, I have friends who consider themselves conservative yet hold support equality for all. Sure, we disagree on a number of things and they sometimes post things that makes me roll my eyes, just as I'm sure they roll their eyes at some of the things I post, but while I may disagree with some of what they say it's certainly not automatically flounce-worthy. In fact, I tend to ignore those posts and move on as it's not worth the argument. That being said, I have been unfriended by someone I've known since high school after I lost my cool when she posted yet another racist rant and I told her exactly what she should do with her views. In other words, she beat me to the unfriending.

I do think I live in somewhat of an echo chamber as most of my friends are of a liberal bent. However, I have other things in common with most of my conservative friends, such as a fandom or a family situation, which is what brought us together in the first place. In these situations liberalism or conservatism take a back seat to our mutual interests and experiences. Politics simply isn't discussed because neither one of us is going to sway the other, and our friendship isn't based on our politics anyway. Heck, in the case of some people I know, both online and in real life, I'm not sure what their actual political views are. It's not important to our relationship.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Oh, look, something I have experience with!

I'll speak of Facebook since that's where I've had the biggest collection of friends from various parts of my life. My main rules for Facebook are "no family" and "no coworkers." I've made a couple exceptions, but for the most part I am steadfast. So, my friends consist generally of the following:

* People I met on message forums over the years (including TrekBBS.) Some of these go back to the mid 1990s.
* Childhood friends from when I lived in Illinois.
* Friends from high school (Alaska.)
* Friends I made while living in Indiana.
* Friends I've made while living in New Jersey.
* One-off people I met online through one venue or another but not necessarily a forum. (Yes, I actually have made good friends from stuff like Omegle, and even ICQ's random chat feature from way back when.)

In my several years on Facebook, I've been defriended "with cause" (as in, it's obvious I was defriended for a reason and not just a general "we never talk and I'm doing a mass purge" strategy) by a handful of people. I will note them as follows:

* A young woman I met on a writing community who regularly expressed racist sentiments and with whom I frequently argued about it. At some point I guess she got sick of it and defriended me.
* A friend from high school who was a devout Christian and, into his late 20s, had only become even more fanatical. This is the kind of person who'd tell you with a straight face that evolution is "only a theory" and make claims that the Bible is a literal, infallible historical and scientific document. If it's not in the Bible, you don't need to know it. After crushing his absurd nonsense with facts for months on end, he let fly some profanity and defriended me. It's fair to say we will not be reconciling anytime soon.
* A young woman who mostly grew up in Jamaica and came to the US. She and her friends frequently made racist comments about black Americans who grew up here. (This is apparently A Thing among Jamaican immigrants.) I mean, whatever, I'm not cool with racism in any form, so I didn't let some of her comments pass, either. Unlike the others, she actually had a large cadre of friends who shared her views so it was basically me against a bunch of other Jamaican immigrants all proclaiming how lazy and stupid American blacks are. Yeah, best to just run away from that mess. She apparently had hard feelings over it since she defriended me shortly thereafter.

Now, I'm someone who enjoys debate for its own sake, so I don't generally take disagreement personally (people who know me from TNZ may argue otherwise, but they're wrong! ) so I wouldn't defriend someone over stuff like that.

Lately, I have a friend who's been posting stuff at least tacitly approving of GamerGate's activities (you know, death threats, harassment, running women out of the gaming industry, etc.) and I think this is just a huge blind spot for her, since she's not a raging idiot on every other topic. Several people have asked why I don't defriend her. I really have no intention of doing so. Again, I am fine with people disagreeing. I'm interested in knowing why someone disagrees, and I will certainly not be satisfied with a simple "because I say so" on topics where there are known, verifiable facts involved. In other words, "your facts are no match for my opinion" is not a sentiment that gets any play with me. If someone wants to like horrible TV shows and movies, whatever. That's totally subjective. Bigotry, though? That's less so, and actively harmful, so I don't let that pass unchallenged.

Some of my friends avoid these topics with me because they know we disagree and they know I come down like a ton of bricks regardless of how well-equipped they are to answer a challenge. I am pretty much okay with that. If someone wants to be a secret bigot, by all means, just don't let me catch you saying it out loud.

I agree that conservatives are probably less likely to have diversity in their social media contacts in the first place and so they will see less attrition over time. Part and parcel of being liberal/progressive is that you're going to come into conflict with other roughly like-minded people because there are just so many rabbit holes you can go down in order to find conflict. Conservatives are more homogeneous, as far as I can tell.

I have a few other friends who are conservative. I argue with them semi-regularly. They aren't complete idiots--they actually pretty smart and that's why I enjoy engaging with them. We don't agree but they come armed with more than "it's just my opinion." There's a mutual respect even though we disagree pretty strongly on a political level. I will say the number of conservatives who fit that description seems to be rather low, and perhaps a significant exception to "mainstream" conservative thought. (Then again, there's no guarantee your typical liberal is particularly bright, either.)

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I'm wondering how the people responding to the poll classified "political statements" when determining if they had unfriended someone over it before. For instance, while I disagree with the sentiment, I think "Obamacare will be looked upon as an unmitigated disaster in the future" is a legitimate political opinion, while "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim communist without a birth certificate!" is just racist blather not worthy of further discussion.

I don't use Facebook myself, but in hearing friends and family members frequently fret over whether or not to unfriend other friends, family, or coworkers, it's usually because of the latter kind of comments toward Obama or bigoted comments against gays, minorities, and women in general, not just over legitimate political disagreements. It comes up quite a bit between my sisters and the rest of the extended family, for instance, and my dear old dad, who's a racist and sexist dick, but they feel compelled not to unfriend 'cause he's still their father.

Basically, my point is, while I would find it silly to unfriend someone over a reasonable difference of opinion politically, I don't think thinly or not so thinly veiled bigoted remarks need to be tolerated simply because they peripherally relate to political topics like Obama or same sex marriage or equal pay for women and so forth. And I think the latter is probably what most people unfriend others over in Facebook comments.

 

[BigJake]

Interesting question.

Yes, I've unfriended or unfollowed people over political postings before, though it takes a lot:

- In a couple of cases they were people prone to conspiracy theory (in my online cohort this has tended to be of either the radical-left or Africentrist / Black Nationalist variety), and it took quite a while to reach the breaking point, which one guy finally tripped by putting up a post claiming that Obama and "his handlers" had created Ebola and ISIS.

- There's been a few people from the more conservative side of the spectrum who I had to unfollow during election seasons because their feeds turned into recycled right-wing media folderol.

- There's only been one person, and relatively close real-life friend, I felt the need to actually unfriend, because he started posting really weird misogynistic diatribes (some of them related to "GamerGate" and some not, the one that finally irked me enough to actually unfriend the guy was an NRO article trying to blame the Rotherham scandal on feminists).

On the whole the need for this is rare, because most of the people who are in my social networks are either RL friends who have enough taste to not be constantly pushing their politics (whatever they are), or various kinds of professional or institutional acquaintances who restrain themselves for other reasons. Likewise I don't keep up a constant stream of political commentary on my feed; in general I don't keep up a constant stream of anything on my feed, and I try to restrict forwarding and sharing things to articles I find genuinely worthwhile and thoughtful in something more than a meme-of-the-moment sense.

(I also try to avoid getting sucked into arguments on Facebook, due to the sorts of experiences that RobMax describes above.)

Do I inhabit an echo chamber? My online social networks lean left but still contain some small-c conservatives and libertarians. They don't tend to contain "movement conservatives," the kind of people who go out fundraising for Republicans or for Harper's Tories or the Wildrose Party here in Alberta, but I'm long past the need to have right-wing viewpoints represented in my online social networks in the belief that this will somehow rectify my own confirmation bias. A spectrum of sane liberals, leftists and small-c conservative views is more than adequate to serving that purpose; and since the echo chamber that movement conservatives inhabit moved outside of "normal" democratic politics a long time ago, no, I don't feel any need for dialogue with it.

 

[Marc]

I have a friend on facebook who's very onesided in her views on Israel (pretty much they can do no wrong) and some of her posts have included some cartons from a very unpleasant pro-Israeli source. Don't unfriend her, simply choose the option to ignore the post and any that come from that particular source (though this could be a fairliy new feature on facebook) and move on.

 

[tomalak301]

I really don't like where I see society going as if you're a political affiliation or part of a religious affiliation, than that makes you a bad person. The best example of this I can think of is Tom Cruise. Cruise had quite a Movie career (And still does) but I've literally heard and read from various people (such as on facebooK) That those same people hate him because he's a scientologist. It's like they watched his movies before, found out he was part of a religious organization, and that automatically changed peoples opinions of him. Now if he went to harm other people in the name of Scientology, that's one thing, but I haven't seen it.

I bring that up because it seems like the way we're headed, people are defined by politics and that should be flat out wrong. Yeah so you don't agree, that doesn't mean that person is bad or anything. You just find something you do agree with, like Sports or something. Politics shouldn't be the only thing to define someone's character, yet it seems like it is.

 

[BigJake]

It gets harder for people to ignore politics as part of the makeup of a person the more those politics are hate-based and involve believing everyone not on your side is evil and lying and must be destroyed. "Movement" conservatism lost the benefit of the doubt from a lot of people as it crossed that line; even when it doesn't necessarily mean the people holding to it are bad people (whatever that means), it still has a way of making them frequently unpleasant. So there's a larger tendency to write people off the further they go down that path. When outright hate and contempt for rationality are in the picture, it's just not realistic to expect that not to happen.

As for Scientology, that has more to do with people thinking it's a crazy and exploitative cult and finding Cruise's association with it unpleasant (or being turned off by the reports of Cruise's creepy behaviour associated with it, such as during his marriage to Katie Holmes). Personally I don't have a problem with watching his movies on those grounds -- I've watched movies featuring worse people, and crazy or not he's an entertaining actor -- but I can understand why some people would feel that distaste.

 

[1001001]

I'm wondering how the people responding to the poll classified "political statements" when determining if they had unfriended someone over it before. For instance, while I disagree with the sentiment, I think "Obamacare will be looked upon as an unmitigated disaster in the future" is a legitimate political opinion, while "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim communist without a birth certificate!" is just racist blather not worthy of further discussion.

I don't use Facebook myself, but in hearing friends and family members frequently fret over whether or not to unfriend other friends, family, or coworkers, it's usually because of the latter kind of comments toward Obama or bigoted comments against gays, minorities, and women in general, not just over legitimate political disagreements. It comes up quite a bit between my sisters and the rest of the extended family, for instance, and my dear old dad, who's a racist and sexist dick, but they feel compelled not to unfriend 'cause he's still their father.

Basically, my point is, while I would find it silly to unfriend someone over a reasonable difference of opinion politically, I don't think thinly or not so thinly veiled bigoted remarks need to be tolerated simply because they peripherally relate to political topics like Obama or same sex marriage or equal pay for women and so forth. And I think the latter is probably what most people unfriend others over in Facebook comments.

This is an excellent post, and clarifies some important stuff.

I don't have Facebook (so I haven't "unfriended" anyone), but I remember back in 2001, I was part of an email group for my fraternity. Most of it was sharing good news, good memories etc. Then came 9/11.

One of the guys sent out a mocked-up screen cap of a "newscast", showing the weather forecast in Kabul for the next day was "2,000,000 degrees" with a mushroom cloud over it.

So me, being the fuzzy-headed One Worlder that I am, I point out that the results of that would be hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed.

Well, you can imagine what came next. America. Jesus. Freedom. Etc etc. So I just bailed on the whole thing.

Now, from their point of view, I may have left the group (that era's "unfriending") over politics. To me, I did not see it as politics, but vulgar racism.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Yay narwhals.

 

[Captrek]

According to The Republican Brain, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants a better understanding of how conservatives and liberals are psychologically different, conservatives and liberals tend to have different moral intuitions. Conservatives tend place a higher value on loyalty, which may have something to do with these results.

 

[tomalak301]

It gets harder for people to ignore politics as part of the makeup of a person the more those politics are hate-based and involve believing everyone not on your side is evil and lying and must be destroyed. "Movement" conservatism lost the benefit of the doubt from a lot of people as it crossed that line; even when it doesn't necessarily mean the people holding to it are bad people (whatever that means), it still has a way of making them frequently unpleasant. So there's a larger tendency to write people off the further they go down that path. When outright hate and contempt for rationality are in the picture, it's just not realistic to expect that not to happen.

I think this is what I'm struggling with when it comes to even talking about politics. I'm an independent, but there are times when I lean on the conservative side of the spectrum. What I don't like is it seems like most of the political talk is spewed by hatred, mostly from the conservative side, but sometimes from the liberal side, and that's why I hate talking about it. We've come to a time where there is no middle ground, there is no compromise and it's the with us or against us mentality. It's also bothersome when a certain part of said idealism takes it over with so much hatred and vile. I still think there are good liberals and conservatives out there, but if you look in mainstream media, you wouldn't know it.

As for Scientology, that has more to do with people thinking it's a crazy and exploitative cult and finding Cruise's association with it unpleasant (or being turned off by the reports of Cruise's creepy behaviour associated with it, such as during his marriage to Katie Holmes). Personally I don't have a problem with watching his movies on those grounds -- I've watched movies featuring worse people, and crazy or not he's an entertaining actor -- but I can understand why some people would feel that distaste.

I agree with you here. It is a shame though because Cruise has done some great movies in the last few years, like Edge of Tomorrow, which might be my most underrated film of 2014. It flopped at the Box Office, and I read part of the reason for that was because Cruise was a scientologist. I guess in this day and age it's hard to separate actor from person and vice versa.

 

[Timby]

I agree with you here. It is a shame though because Cruise has done some great movies in the last few years, like Edge of Tomorrow, which might be my most underrated film of 2014. It flopped at the Box Office, and I read part of the reason for that was because Cruise was a scientologist.

This idea really doesn't hold water, given that Cruise has been involved with Scientology since something like 1990, and plenty of his movies have made metric fucktons of money since then. Edge of Tomorrow under-performed because it had a hilariously incompetent marketing campaign (and it had the misfortune of coming out right after X-Men and Godzilla and just before 22 Jump Street).

 

[Pingfah]

Mind you, it only underperformed in the USA, it did amazing business everywhere else up against those same movies, winding up with a very decent gross for a non franchise sci-fi flick. Even better than Oblivion, which also did well internationally. Frankly, Cruise is one of the few people out there pushing for risky, big budget original sci-fi. We should be kissing his boots

Anyhows, I have never unfriended anyone over politics. I have some real conservative wankers as friends actually, we share love of other things though.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

According to The Republican Brain, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants a better understanding of how conservatives and liberals are psychologically different, conservatives and liberals tend to have different moral intuitions. Conservatives tend place a higher value on loyalty, which may have something to do with these results.

I'm sure that liberals value loyalty as much as conservatives do.

Me, I have a few Twitter followers who are liberals and I would never unfollow them because of that. I can't afford to let politics get in the way - I need all the followers I can get!

seriously, that's kind of a bad move anyway...IMHO, people should know who they're following or friending from the start. If you can't stand their politics, don't ever follow them in the first place. To follow and then unfollow somebody is a bigger insult than never following them at all.

 

[Davros]

Lately, conservatives are more likely to embrace views deserving of an unfriending.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

I'm a narwhal!

 

[Locutus of Bored]

My turn to be the obligatory out of touch old man in the thread.

Yay narwhals.

I'm a narwhal!

What's this in reference to? Is it something on Bookface or The Youtubes you kids are using? I found the "I'm a narwhal" video with The Google, but it has nothing to do with politics. Please explain, and then get off my lawn.