Do not unfriend people who disagree with you

Before we set out, let me accept that there are some very necessary reasons for breaking online ties with someone. Some popular examples are someone repeatedly badgering you for a job despite being reasoned with, someone taking a personal jab at you, stalkers, cyber bullying, rape jokes, brute crassness and so on. This article, however, is going to be about why it is important to hold on to online connections with opposing ideologies.

Too often have we all seen people proudly making announcements that they have unfriended everyone promoting an opposing political ideology.

A little over a decade ago as social media, as we know it today, began linking us as it has, many of us assumed that a more-networked world would naturally be a smarter and more communicative. However, it really hasn’t and has probably made it even worse.



This is mostly because conversations in different schools of thoughts are happening in silos. In the light of the social media campaign around the next big Marvel superhero movie release, the Captain America fans are tweeting and communicating with #TeamCap and the Iron Man fans with #TeamIronman. They are not talking to each other.



Closer to home, and slightly more relevant, the AAPtards are the ones using the hashtag #Bhaktards and the Bhaktards are the ones propagating #AAPtards. One side spreads Anupam Kher’s speech and the other Barkha Dutt’s. Across the world we have #Trump vs #Bernie, #Labour vs #Conservative, #GreenFraud vs #GlobalWarming. You get the picture. Each set is only speaking amongst itself. The internet has effectively created multiple echo chambers that are only getting consistently larger and hence more dangerous.



To make things worse, it is that once someone posts something, for example, “Climate change is merely socialist propaganda. #greenfraud”, they will rarely admit to them having been wrong. Regardless of the quality of the arguments presented in the comments that follow, their human ego will not allow it. And even if they did society has a way of making them feel bad for admitting they were wrong. It’s an auto-immune disease.

It’s usually at the end of seemingly fruitless conversations that people wind up “unfriending” or “unfollowing” one another. Today I’m here writing this piece asking you to please NOT do that. Stick around. Force yourself to take that extra effort. In my mind every unfriending over a rival ideology is similar to a plastic bottle thrown on a beautiful trek in the mountains. It just needs a little extra effort to hold on to that bottle till you walk back into civilization and find a bin.



I am going to close this article with a video of possibly the best example for this problem. It compares how Donald Trump and Barack Obama’s methodology of dealing with protesters.



Don’t be like Trump. Don’t throw people with opposing ideas out of your life. Hear them out. Talk back, but don’t talk down. Just don’t add to the growing echo chambers.


(Jacob Cherian is the Chief Ideas Officer at www.SocialMediaForRestaurants.IN and www.WindowsToNGOs.com -- digital media agencies that specialize in the hospitality and development sector specifically)

(Images/Videos: Thinkstock, Indiatimes, YouTube, i.ytimg, dailymaverick, 1.bp.blogspot, screencrush)