James Poulos says much with which I agree.
Twitter is a megaphone for the worldview wars. It fosters constant competition among our claims that everyone should care and act as we do.
Read the whole thing. I would like to thank a commenter who told me about “unfollowing,” which is one of many useful but hidden options on Facebook. I have been unfollowing friends, left and right, who use Facebook only to post political views.
I think of myself as anti-elitist. But I am even more anti-mobist. When the mob emerges, I cease to be libertarian and instead become ultra-conservative. There is no phenomenon more barbaric than the mob.
Agreed about “unfollow,” although what I was using was the “Hide Posts From This User” function. (This is also handy for not seeing all the Candy Crush Saga and other game clutter out there.) I had an old college buddy whom I was happy to friend (now, a verb, ugh) but all he put up were political posts. He’s conservative and I lean mildly minarchist, so the positions weren’t uncongenial. But, dude, how are the wife and kids? What’s your dog look like? “Unfriending” someone is somewhat of a statement and apparently a serious perceptual sledgehammer besides, so I didn’t want to do that. So I hid his posts.
This is also helpful when your relatives exit romantic relationships with people who’ve consequently friended you. It’s cruel to be ditched by your ex’s FB friends in bulk. Hide the posts, and nobody’s the wiser. Except Mark Zuckerberg, I guess.
When a Facebook friend puts up a political post, I almost always hide that particular post immediately, without even reading it. (My political views are light years distant from those of most people I know.) There’s no need to generally “unfollow” a person or to hide all his or her posts. I can stand seeing an uncongenial post for the few seconds it takes to determine whether to hide it.
Another known software issue.
It should allow crowdsourced tagging.
I tag it as political. You set your viewer to screen out posts people you trust have tagged as political.
I always found it odd when people “like” a story about a horrific car crash. Facebook must deem this problem unprofitable to fix.