The True Face of Facebook
I’m not quite understanding the concept of all the different groups we currently have on Facebook. I belong to quite a few, some I’ve joined willingly in an effort to expand my knowledge on certain subjects or because I was actively looking to purchase something. Some I was added to and either can’t figure out how to remove myself or (and most likely this) I don’t know how to remove myself and I’m just to lazy to try and figure it out. Lately though, and when I saw lately I mean within the last year, I’m completely floored by the temperature of these groups. I’m all about freedom of speech and believe that a good old fashion CLEAN debate is good for the brain; but I’m confused by the hostility, by the viciousness, by the way people type what I can’t believe they would ever dare say to another human being face to face.
Maybe people have always been this way on these sites and I’m just now starting to notice or maybe it’s a new thing that’s just started, either way it’s not ok. What gives people the right to bash another person from the safety of their computer? What gives a person the right to talk about another person’s personal business on social media when it has nothing at all to do with the person writing and posting. I know that by using social media we automatically make a choice to live our lives publicly but does that give others the right to attack us for their opinion of how we live our lives or what we believe?
I first met the wrath of the Facebook women of my not so small town when I chose to publicly post about a negative experience my family and I had at a restaurant during Harvey. The experience was insulting, embarrassing and frustrating to myself and my family on an already emotionally charged day. Shame on that business for giving bad customer service but shame on ME for living in the moment and posting a bad review on a public site like Facebook. In hindsight I should’ve used Yelp since that’s what’s it’s for, lesson learned y’all! That night I made a poor choice and because of it within minutes of making my post I was blasted by people who don’t know me, don’t know my family or my situation. I was told that I was lazy, I was rude, I was selfish, I cared more about eating out than about the Harvey victims, the insults went on and on until the post was finally removed by the admins of the site, that’s how bad it got. I sat there in my jammies eating frozen pizza bites (there was nothing else in the house at that point) with tears streaming down my face reading the comments steadily coming in about what an awful person I was. My husband asked why I cared what people thought of me when they didn’t even know me and, bless him he’s so right, I shouldn’t have cared and looking back, I honestly don’t. But in that moment, in that hour I felt totally and completely assaulted by women who didn’t know that I’d been helping a friend clean out his flooded home and hugging his wife while she mourned the loss of her kids baby pictures. They didn’t care that I hadn’t seen my mom in over a week because we were flooded in and I just needed to hug her neck and be with her, or that we were caring for our livestock which can’t care for themselves in natural disasters, they didn’t know because they didn’t ask. They knew nothing except what they read in my post and assumed about me and my family, they made it clear what they thought of me wasn’t at all pretty.
Looking back I should’ve figured out how to remove myself from that site at that moment but there are good aspects of being a member of these sites. There’s recommendations of service providers and um, well you know that’s about all the positive I can think of right now, the rest is really just gossip sessions, which leads me to the most current heartache. This time though the heartache is not mine but for a total stranger, who like me made the drastic mistake of in the heat of the moment posting something on a public page that should’ve stayed private. Her post was also quickly taken down, only to have another post about her put up on another site where people placed themselves as judge and jury, where people chose to blast her. Y’all, it’s not our place! Most people are already fighting a battle and that battle is most likely larger than what they are inadvertently allowing others to see, so why do people feel the need to add fuel to their fire? If what happens behind the keyboards on the local Facebook sites happened to these women’s kids in school they’d be banging down the doors calling for heads on a platter because their baby was being bullied. But they don’t see it that way, they see it as cleaning up our town which is why they blast people while posting photos so that they can publicly shame each other.
I’ll be completely honest y’all. That moment that I was the object of their wrath was probably the moment that I realized that this town, MY town had changed. I took my first steps here. I married my high school love here. I gave birth to and raised three children here. I buried my father here. This town that I was born and raised in and has held my heart for 44 years was a town born out of the Quaker faith of peacemakers and friends , the actions of some of the women in these groups is anything but what the Quakers envisioned when they first founded this beautiful town.
I still belong to these groups (I mean I guess I’ll probably be removed now) but I stay because I care about my town and my neighbors and if there’s a need I want to be there. Maybe we could start another group, you know ‘the no drama one’?