It’s an inescapable fact that all of us who use social media can be very annoying. Whether it’s a political rant, a plea for sympathy or just something plain uninteresting, there’s probably always at least one of our friends or followers thinking “I wish he/she would shut up!”
But if irritating the people who follow you on Facebook is amusing to you, what’s the best way to find yourself hidden from people’s timelines?
According to an article published on Independent.co.uk, travel company Sunshine has carried out research suggesting ‘holiday bragging’ is the main reason why people hide posts. About one in five (21%) of Facebook users polled said they had done this, with the vast majority of them (88%) admitting they did so out of jealousy.
Serial selfie posters also tend to get the axe from timelines, with 15% saying they had hidden people who can’t stop taking and uploading photos of themselves, and providing too much ‘personal information’ (10%) was another bugbear.
However, it seems that while holiday-related posts and photos make us head for the ‘hide post’ option, they’re not usually enough to make us actually unfriend people.
If you’ve found yourself with fewer Facebook friends than you used to have of late, it’s more likely to be to do with your conduct in the run-up to the June 8th general election, or perhaps in the aftermath of the inauguration of Donald Trump as US President.
More than a quarter (28%) of survey participants said they had removed friends because of irritating or clashing political posts – considerably higher than the number who have done so simply because they had fallen out (24%) or lost touch (16%) with the person. Additionally, 10% culled somebody from their friend list because they realised they had added someone they didn’t know – something that’s generally not advisable.
What’s most interesting to find from this survey is that there seems to be difference between the kind of Facebook behaviour we simply don’t want to see, and the kind that makes us actually distance ourselves from other social media users.
As we’ve mentioned in a previous blog, people use social media to project an idealised form of themselves, and this can lead to feelings of jealousy among those seeing their online behaviour. With holiday-related posts, the fact that culprits tend to be hidden rather than removed suggests that we don’t hold them in contempt, but rather they’re simply stirring a feeling inside us that we don’t wish to experience.
With political views, on the other hand, if these clash with ours it can seem like more like a violation, and there is a sense of conflict that causes us to actually sever social media ties with the person. While like the likes of spoof news reporter Jonathan Pie might argue (forcefully and with some nsfw language, just to forewarn you!) that politics becomes strained if we simply silence and shut out views we disagree with rather than engage with them, it seems like on social media at least, our response is “I’m not your friend anymore!”
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