A few months ago, as part of a bold experiment in posting beyond the bounds of my bubble, I resolved to start setting all of my Facebook posts to Public (note to dad: it’s in the little dropdown menu in the box where you write the post).
Election season was ramping up, Orlando had just happened, I was feeling fiery and angry and vocal and venty. I didn’t want to speak more firmly into the echo chamber of my friendzone; I wanted to shout into the sky, waste my breath on a grander scale. So I selected the little globe icon and opened my Facebook to the world. Maybe not the best idea.
When I post something scratchy, my friends respond with either the calming “there, there’’ of a “Like’’ or the politeness of plain silence; but strangers on Facebook owe me no such courtesy. Everything I posted as Public was like raw meat thrown into a troll pen.
My posts were quickly beset by random nasties, derailing discussions with all-caps insults (usually based on my profile pics), attacking whichever friends of mine showed up in the thread, and introducing a kind of social media pollution I’d never had to deal with before. Some of these threadstormers would even extend their campaign of vitriol into other posts of mine, their opinions spreading like a fungus all over my Timeline.
Among friends or second-degree acquaintances that I’m connected to online, egregious breaches of etiquette or taste were typically addressed with a simple click of the “Unfollow’’ button — it’s a way of keeping a relationship intact while rendering it effectively inert. Only when some interpersonal offense reveals some kind of irreconcilable difference or lost cause would I pull the trigger and defriend. This situation called for something stronger. So I started blocking.
Defriending is an ending, but a block is a full-on erasure. When you block someone, they can’t see you, and you can’t see them. You can’t tag or talk to each other. It’s as though the other person never existed. As social media features go, blocking amounts to the virtual realization of a long-held fantasy — complete control who gains entry to the domain of your awareness.
And while blocking may seem drastic, there are plenty of reasons to do it. For many, blocking isn’t just a matter of preference, but of personal safety (stalkers, trolls, and exes — oh my). Blocking makes for a clean, easy break from unpleasant online social entanglements. It can even be wielded as a rhetorical move — a well-timed block at the finish of an argument can feel like a form of punctuation.
As the election crept closer and political divides online grew louder and cleaved deeper, the temptation of the block button grew harder and harder to resist. I found myself requiring less and less justification to banish: Dumb sexist comment? Block. Vaguely racist insinuation? Block. Candy Crush invite? Block block block.
It felt so right — but it also felt a little wrong. Going Public was supposed to be about dissolving the borders of my online life, inviting unexpected encounters and conversations, putting myself out there and facing the music. Was my newfound love of the block button sabotaging that mission? When I blocked that guy for behaving like a little fascist, was that me behaving like a little fascist?
This past week, longtime AIDS activist Peter Staley posted a defense of his own “aggressive use’’ of the block feature in a note on his Facebook page, responding to friends’ assertions that his tendency to block was essentially a suppressive act: “I’m protecting my mental health,’’ he wrote. “I also think I’m protecting my threads from degrading into uselessness (you might disagree). Yes, my online bubble is smaller because of this. That’s the unfortunate price I’m willing to pay to preserve my happiness, and to preserve some sort of civility in my threads.’’
I suppose it’s the same logic that justifies throwing a loud drunk out of a bar, or moving a chatty passenger from the quiet car, or sending a bully to the principal’s office. When I block, it’s not so much about retreating into a “safe space,’’ it’s about enforcing a standard of civility out in the online open — and that alone feels like a Public service.
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.
