When to Speak Up About Your ‘Friends’ Being Jerks on Social Media
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When to Speak Up About Your ‘Friends’ Being Jerks on Social Media

No one joins Twitter to police speech, but sometimes it’s important to break up the fight.

It didn't start out as much of an argument.

I had only met Tim once. I thought he was prone to some reactionary opinions, but he seemed to be an OK guy. However, in this instance, we were going back and forth on Twitter, disagreeing about "mansplaining," and I believed he was defending a sexist point of view. The dialogue seemed reasonable.

Then Elle parachuted in: She told him he was wrong, and he should go die.

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When I read the words, I was shocked. I had been irritated with Tim, but her comment was one I would never tolerate from a friend. The problem was that Elle wasn't my friend. Really, I barely knew either of them. In the moment, I wondered if I should get involved and risk being on the receiving end of Elle's wrath. I'm not her friend, I thought, let alone her mother.

In the end, I didn't do anything—and I regret it still.

By connecting so many people at once, the internet has made it incredibly easy and efficient for people to argue—something we've done, in one way or another, as long as we've existed. From the beginning of our online lives, fights have taken place on message boards or forums or comment threads, and in those spaces, moderators often intervened to de-escalate the situation (or, more drastically, to ban everyone).

An off-putting comment can make everyone feel bad—creating the online equivalent of the dinner table going completely silent.

People still go to moderated forums to talk and argue with one another, but today, a big chunk of online discussion happens on the social media profiles of individual people. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of all adults online used Facebook.

Social media has opened the line of communication, and interactions like the one Elle and Tim had on my Twitter feed are frequent. In this case, I was the only common link—their single mutual online acquaintance.

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When a discussion occurring within a shared contact's thread explodes, he or she is put on the spot. You would never invite your socialist college roommate to the same party as your Reagan-loving uncle, but social media often draws an unlikely gathering of the most disparate parts of your life.

A lot of us work hard to build firewalls between the different lives we lead, but "work" is the operative word here: It takes effort to maintain the separate social contexts you live in. And whether it's a political stance, a lighthearted comment on pop culture, or just a personal update, all social threads have the potential to take a wrong turn.

In an age where all of those conversations are happening online, instead of just at cocktail parties and other IRL social gatherings, it's necessary to start taking responsibility for what happens on your Facebook page, on your Instagram, and in your Twitter mentions.

Of course, it can be extremely awkward to step in, even with a mild-mannered, "Hey, I don't appreciate you saying that to my friend. Can we tone it down a little?" Normal people don't join social networks to police other people's speech. But your unwillingness to speak up can hurt people—it will make you feel bad and possibly alienated from your online home. And it's not always as obvious as someone telling another person to kill him or herself or to "just die already." An off-putting comment can make everyone feel bad—creating the online equivalent of the dinner table going completely silent.

Here's the advice I wish I'd gotten before that regrettable interaction between Tim and Elle on my public social media profile: Take charge now and then—you shouldn't be spending 1.72 hours a day (the daily average in 2014, according to a survey by Global Web Index) on social networks only to feel like a hostage tiptoeing around.

The tech companies might be the ultimate landlords of our little online spaces, but that doesn't mean your social media profile isn't yours. And if you can't or won't break up a fistfight in your own house, what's the point of playing host?

This article appears in the April issue of VICE Magazine.