Hide it the 1st time, defriend if it becomes a pattern.
If its someone you know well IRL, I would say talk to them in person. If its someone who you worked with three jobs ago or maybe an old highschool buddy who you don’t see IRL, de-friend ASAP.
I have very few FB friends because I have no desire to friend every single person who I’ve ever had contact with. I’ve de-friended two people: my SIL, because the only things she ever posted ever were those stupid ‘please be the 2% that reposts this request’ or ‘if you don’t repost this you’re on the side of the devil and not Jesus’ crap statuses. The other was a woman who I used to work with who put some extremely racist shit about Obama on their feed. Screw that.
A difference of opinion, fine. Political views, fine. Overt racist and homophobic statements? Goodbye.
I usually make fun of them and see how long it takes for them to unfriend me.
I love the lightness of being unbearable.
Through that process I no longer have very many of the random high school classmate ‘friends’ I picked up a while back. Many of them have turned out to be really, really homophobic and racist.
Though the people I have the biggest problem with on facebook aren’t direct friends, they’re usually friends of friends making stupid comments to things my friends post. I make fun of them, too, but it’s harder to tell if/when they block me.
I’m pretty certain this is why all the cousins on my mum’s side defriended me. Meh, saved me the trouble of defriending them down the line I suspect.
Yesterday I got fed up with the anti-Muslim crap that so many of my FB acquaintances are reposting, so I changed my status to a request that they unfriend me before they post it rather than leave me thinking less of them. Confronting them does no good as inevitably their other friends will chime in with some jingoistic bullshit about this being “our” country and so forth and I just end up depressed by how widespread and socially acceptable bigotry is.
It’s threads like this I’m glad the worst posts I get on Facebook are religious glurge (God loves every one of his blessed creatures, etc.) every so often. Also the incessant Farmville requests. I had one that used to post pretty conservative rants all the time, but they’re actually well informed and I enjoy them.
I used to defriend but that was because I hadn’t investigated the ignoring option. These days I just ignore. You never know when/why you might want to contact them in the future, so no real need to cut off everything.
I’ll discuss the bigotry if I can be arsed. Sometimes I can. The last time was when a rather fundamentalist Christian sibling of my girlfriend at the time was posting a lot about how gays should not be allowed to marry.
The last time I defriended someone was when I split up with an ex that I had seen for 9.5 years. She cheated on me and I was angry. She’s probably the only one I am glad I defriended, others I probably should have just ignored.
Edit:
By “ignore” I mean “remove from my feed but not defriend”.
I posted something about how so many people seemed to have a very short memory. Just a month or so ago they were commenting on how bad the Met were for colluding with journalists, not just with hacking but with things like tip-offs for if someone was arrested, so that journalists could be waiting for them when they arrive home after release. But now the very same people are joining “support the Met!” groups.
This didn’t go down well. I didn’t defriend anyone though.
Well i think just ignore it IS an option. Some people really aren’t looking to have that encounter after a long day at work etc… De-friending i guess is fine…
Myself i just wade in an attack. I just assailed a friend of mine for posting one of those dumb ass repost/celebration post about FLA drug testing for food stamp benefits. Quickly it was leaned that my friend had no clue how the loss of benefits would be handled since the FEDS run the food stamp issue.
I just recently jumped on another dumb ass post about the 2nd amendment thanking all of my dipshit co-workers (cops… yeah i know) for making it impossible for me to purchase ammo after the Presidential election…
I think its up to the person… I’m sure I’ve gotten my ass de-friended quite a bit… but asshattery needs to be challenged… and hey… if you make some solid points i can give it up and shut the hell up…
It kills me how the glurge is always about how brave it is to be one of the humble few who honor God publicly on Facebook. And it’s coming from like five different people a day. I want to say, ‘‘You think it’s tough being a Christian, try being an atheist.’’
I can tolerate the occasional religious post; doesn’t bother me. I did defriend someone I used to be very close to because of her religion. She was out of control. First it was comparing homosexuality to pedophilia, then wondering aloud whether you can be a Christian if you’re not American, and the last straw was dissing the concept of the bonding chemical oxytocin and saying agnostics don’t know the meaning of real love. I let that drag on for weeks out of respect for who she used to be to me. Now I don’t even hesitate. If more than half of your posts are Bible quotes, we probably don’t have much in common.
Kathy Griffin said it best “…were you born a bigot or did you grow into it?”
Any friends I REALLY care about keeping wouldn’t say/do anything that offends me. I have few friends, but we all seem to be cut from the same cloth.
Interestingly, I don’t communicate with any of them via FB so my FB peeps I can take or leave. As such I have no problem calling them out or asking for an explanation for why they think something. I have great fun with my right wing acquaintances. They don’t dump me because they still think I can be turned; and people say I’m delusional. Sometimes the result is a disgusted pile-on by others who support the mutual friend, sometimes my comment inspires others to chime in with, “Yeah, that IS out of line.” In my opinion a true friend will let you know when you’re being a dickhead and why. If someone can’t handle that then I welcome the defriending.
I don’t get those kinds of posts very often. I have one very good friend who is ultra-conservative, and he’ll sometimes post opinions that seem very closed-minded, with just a tinge of bigotry. But he’s culled his friend list down to only about 20 people, and we usually all comment on his posts–but every once in awhile, he’ll toss out a real floater, and it’s interesting that all of us let it sink w/o comment. For this fella, our silence speaks volumes.
I briefly allowed friends-of-friends to comment on my page (right after the earthquake/tsunami). My friends are cool; their friends will also be cool, right? NoooOOO. One asshole wrote some ching-chang-chung anti-asian comment. I cordially invited him to fuck himself, and blocked him altogether. My friend wrote to apologize, then de-friended him too.
The only other unpalatable stuff comes from my cousins, alas. I love them too much to defriend, so I hide their posts, pop over to their pages to say hello once in awhile, and we’re all happy.