Facebook Etiquette, When To Unfriend, Unfollow

Reasons to Unfriend

• Offensive behavior – Lewd comments and no boundaries, insulting remarks to you personally or others, prejudice, bigotry, posting inflammatory/dishonest information.

  

  To the right is an example of an inflammatory Facebook post whereby the poster is making many generalizations, most inaccurate and divisive

 
• Flaming friends in the comments streams of your posts or allowing others in your posts to flame yourself or friends while the so-called friend watches on.
  Flaming = heated / disrespectful confrontation.
  Example, allowing another or personally attacking you with rude remarks such as calling you an “idiot”, “tin foil hat wearing clown”, “denier”, etc.; often as a result of not being able to address factual/referenced information in a discussion
• Marginalizing your access to his or her wall. This is when a friend sets her privacy settings to exclude certain people from posting on her wall. The wall is open to some of her friends – and you can see their posts, but not open to you. There is no place for posting on her wall. You’re on her “B” list.

  Sometimes these persons who post inflammatory/dishonest information and know that you will not let them get away with miss-information will do this, or they will simply un-friend you. Sometimes unfriending can be an accident, so giving a person a chance by asking again to be a friend can determine this, but if they do not respond and they are a person that posts inflammatory/dishonest information, they are not really person you likely should associate with anyway.

We all might post something that is not respectful to our friends, so the occasional mistake is not what we are saying here. As well, a true friend will often acknowledge such mistakes and remove such posts.
Otherwise, if this behavior is common, the above are hardly friends.

Worse if they claim to be Christians, it is best to not associate with such persons:
Titus 3:10- “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them”
Romans 16:17- “I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them”

Reasons to Hide or Unfollow (not necessarily un-friend)

• Direct selling or “Me-Centric” FB behavior – only pushes a product or agenda on Facebook with no personal interaction.
  I personally make posts about my businesses, but I also like and share others business postings as well (in fact I share and like probably 20 post from others to every one for me).
  It is rather “Me-Centric” to share your world, but to refuse to be a friend and not at least look at others posts and like/share occasionally, especially if part of their livelihood is based on social media driven traffic (which our professional world is more and more dependent upon nowadays)
• Posting controversial information that is often half-truths or even blatantly false.
  Then when called out on this, refusing to read reputable information (that is not from far right or far left sources) showing why this was wrong.
• One Topic Poster – preachy types that only post about one particular cause – animal cruelty, support our troops, Obama is Satan, We love Obama, religion, atheism, or just non-stop pictures of one’s dog (or cat, or kid). We all do some of this, but the One-topic Poster ONLY posts about the cause.
• Constant Memer – This person posts 5 to 10 Memes a day … over and over. They never saw a Meme they didn’t like. (Memes are those funny little cards, graphics, videos with humerous messages embedded that are created to be shared).

Resource/Reference:

Consequenses of Defriending or Unfriending on Facebook

My Professional Facebook Pages:

American Aquarium Products & Information on Facebook
Aquarium/Pond Answers on Facebook

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