My Facebook Users’ Policy.

By Tom Demerly.

I view Facebook as a place to socialize, connect, share similarities and expand understanding. Not a place to draw lines or open wounds.

It’s rare for me to “unfriend” someone, but last week I did that and it made me sad.

I was sad because I sense that I actually like the person, even though there are some things I disagree with them about. That is fine.

But at which point a person begins to use a public and social platform to spread more than just their beliefs- to spread hurt and ridicule and even hate, then I must exclude them from the stream of consciousness that is my Facebook feed.

Here’s why:

Social media isn’t reality. We portray ourselves the way we want other people to see (and not see) us. We paint a picture, based more or less, on some version of who we really are. That is good because it is, well, “social” and it gives us a very controllable 600 X 800 persona. It is bad because what we envision in the virtual does have a tendency to manifest itself in reality.

I subscribe to a few axioms of life; one of them is that “We each create our own reality”. The reality I wish to create is one of friendship, unity, understanding, tolerance and kindness. I am not about drawing lines or about cruelty or ridicule.

You may disagree with me if you’d like, and I may disagree with you, but we can still find common interests on social media. And I welcome your ideas.

I am interested in making new connections, especially with people in places I either have never been or do not understand. In the words of great author Steven Covey I try, as best I can, to “seek first to understand, then to be understood”.

Over 4,000 people tolerate my incessant and tedious litany of Facebook posts about my cats, strange animals real and imagined, airplanes, triathlons, bicycles, scantily clad girls and videos of strange happenings. Every once in a while a few people get fed up with it and “unfriend” me, and every few days I pick up a few new “friends”, almost always people I have never have never met, nor will I ever meet.

A big part of my involvement in Facebook is commercial- to promote the work I do for a few different outlets in three different and unrelated industries. People get understandably bored with that too. Fair enough. There’s an “unfriend” button for that.

But the quickest and really the only way to get “unfriend-ed” by me is for someone to threaten violence, or advocate ridicule or insult in what should be a peaceful space. This is a gray area, and I support some institutions that do violence; the military is an example. But I am judicious (at least I think so) in my advocacy of these causes and interests, and I acknowledge you may have no interest in them. I respect that. You may even take exception to them. I accept that.

There are vast areas of gray in social media use; what is obscene or profane to some of my friends is acceptable, desirable even, to others. There is a point where gray becomes black and that isn’t always the same all the time, with every topic and every person, but I know when I see it. And I won’t let it in my Facebook feed.