Not having read the thread (yet) in my small personal experience on Facebook liberals are the big unfrienders.
@ MLB: What do you mean "The only thing I can think of"? You were the one who brought it up! So it's just a random reference with no relevance to anything here, and I'm not missing anything?
I voted "I'm a narwhal." I'm a liberal who is surrounded by mostly ultra-conservatives. The people I meet online are conservative, and liberal. There are a few places I visit where liberals make up the majority of the site. I don't unfriend anyone based solely on their political beliefs. I'm generally the type of person who tries to find common ground with everyone.
Dude, it's not an interrogation, I was just curious. When I first clicked on the thread to respond the first time, the poll wasn't up yet, so I didn't know "I'm a narwhal" was one of the options until you just mentioned it, because I never scrolled back up to read the OP again after that. I thought I was missing some kind of joke and just wanted to find out what it was. Sorry.
They're so pointy and cute. I have friends with opposing political views. Either side has yet to "unfriend" me. I guess they really are real friends after all.
I've never de-friended someone because of political differences. I'm a big believer in healthy debate, even if the people I usually end up debating with are people so entrenched in their ways that they can't see the forest for the trees. Besides, the whole act of "de-friending" is entirely immature. It's a last-resort "fuck you!" to whoever you are doing it to. You can say it's because you don't want to read their spiel anymore, but you can easily achieve that by "hiding" them (on Facebook, anyway.) I like to think I'm open-minded enough that I can consider other people's viewpoints even if I don't necessarily agree with them. But there have been occasions too where that kind of reciprocity and consideration was not at all present from the opposing parties. And that sucks, because those kinds of interactions rarely end well.
I'm the most liberal person in my family. I tire of always swimming upstream. When cousins have spouted conservative racist crap I reduce the amount of their stuff I have to see. When my parents and sibling get unbeaRble I take mini vacations from fb.
I don't really divide my friends into those who are liberal and conservative. Besides in Australia the Liberal Party is the more conservative of the two major parties. My Facebook friends are mostly real-life friends or family members. Sometimes they say things that are politically stupid but I tend to treat them the same way as I would if they said such things in real life - I ignore them if it is something unimportant or politely give my opinion if I disagree with them. I don't unfriend them.
I'm a moderate liberal and I have only unfriended one conservative on FB. This was because he was so anti-Obama that his comments were overtly racist and violent. It wasn't so much the political side, but when it veered off into unveiled wishes that someone would take a gun and go after the president, it made me angry because that's unacceptable no matter who POTUS is. At some point, his arguments about black people and liberals and how we're all on welfare, etc., made me angry just to read, and I thought, I'm in this group he is insulting. At that point I unfriended him. It's not the politics, it's the expression. I guess my limit is, if reading your posts makes me this angry and upset for the rest of the day, I don't really want to be your friend in any sense of the word.
Wow, yeah that's not political, that's to preserve your sanity against the onslaught of a racist, bigoted extremist.
I unfriended someone once because I got tired of their political rants and memes. But I've unfriended more people because they posted really stupid stuff, and I got tired of having to provide links to Snopes. (I'm also in the process of eliminating most of the people I talk to elsewhere online, including here, and making FB mostly real-life friends and family.)
I get friend requests from people I don't know all the time. I'll go ahead and accept, but if they post a lot of crap I don't want cluttering up my page I'll just "unfollow" them.
I wouldn't unfriend someone for their political views - more likely would hide individual updates or even unfollow them for a short amount of time. Plus here - liberal and conservative are very similar.