but there are easier ways to ignore the political stuff than to unfriend someone. What the unfriending tells me is that if our views are really that divergent, we never really were friends anyway--and that's good to know.

I'm one of those people who has at least 10 things a day political on my Facebook page. Even someone with the same ideology as myself said yesterday (and this wasn't direct at me) that he's getting sick of the political posts on Facebook.

It must be so self-satisfying for the "moderate", rational and above the fray centrists to feel the way they do.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/11/30/where-is-my-motivation/

political postings of any kind.

Easier.

I seem to get a lot of items in my feed that I share.

After making an innocuous comment about Akin to the effect that he couldn't find a uterus if he had a roadmap, the person lit into me telling me how stupid I was and how he would run circles around me in a debate on the subject of reproductive rights. I refused to take the bait which appeared to outrage the person. I say person. This was a close relative. He worked himself into such a rage over it that it got personal. So personal he unfriended, blocked and appears to have deleted his FB account entirely.

I pretty much didn't do anything but witness the rightwing meltdown.

People get incredibly irate if you opt out of replying to them, as if they believe they are in charge of the conversation and you are being insubordinate if you don't follow their guidelines and timetables for your responses. I tend to cross those people off my list as mentally unstable and not worth my energy.

it seemed to make him madder still.

(see the details: http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html)

Austrian student takes on Facebook over privacy

In this photo taken Monday, Oct. 10, 2011, Austrian student Max Schrems holds files about his activities on his Facebook account that Facebook handed over to him, in Vienna, Austria. Schrems wasn't quite sure what information about himself Facebook would send him after he filed a request with the social networking giant to receive his personal data, as is required under European law.

It certainly wasn't the stack of 1,222 pages worth on a CD that inspired him to launch an online campaign aimed at forcing the social media behemoth to abide by European data privacy laws _ something the Palo Alto, California-based company insists it already does. Since August, some 350,000 people have visited the site, dubbed "Europe vs. Facebook," and flooded Facebook's European branch, based in Ireland, with requests for their personal data. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

One of Schrems' main complaints with Facebook, he says, is that company retains information far longer than allowed under European law, which it most cases is limited to a few months.

"I wondered, what are they doing with my data?" Schrems said, sitting with his laptop in a Viennese coffee house. "I thought through everything that one can do with that amount of information, all the marketing that is possible."

Under European law, consumers have the right to request a record of the personal information held by a company. The law further stipulates that to retain data beyond the limit of several months, a company must have a reason to do so...(more)

http://phys.org/news/2011-10-austrian-student-facebook-privacy.html

see also: http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/