By Katherine Bindley
Mark Duffy has an app that notifies him when his Instagram
followers decide they no longer want to see his posts. Last year he
was surprised by one name that showed up: his cousin.
"I was like, that's kind of forward," says Mr. Duffy, a student
at Fordham University in New York. "That's kind of
uncomfortable."
He retaliated by unfollowing his cousin back, and he went a step
further, posting a Twitter poll asking if he should
"confront/fight" his cousin about it on Christmas Eve.
"Oh, I think you fight him," said a private Twitter message he
got.
It was from his cousin. "I forgot he followed me on Twitter,"
Mr. Duffy says.
The holidays have long held the prospect of disagreement with
seldom-seen relatives and friends, threatening the feel-good vibe.
Social media add an element of anxiety for those who may have cut
off a virtual relationship during the year. Someone you feuded with
months earlier online can turn up across the dinner table.
When Mr. Duffy's extended family gathered at his parents' house
in Connecticut last year, he tried to ignore his cousin. "The whole
day I was so nervous to see him 'cause I was so concerned we were
going to have to have a full-fledged conversation," he says. When
the two finally did talk, neither said anything about Instagram.
"It totally felt, like, as if it never happened," Mr. Duffy
says.
Matt Cole, 25, has an aunt with political opinions opposite his
-- views that neither is shy about voicing online. This month he
saw her for the first time in a couple of years at a Christmas
gathering at his grandmother's house. While the family was chatting
in the living room, his aunt turned the subject to Twitter.
"She brought it up and said, 'Yeah, I had to unfollow Matt here
because I would read his tweets and have to sit on my thumbs,' "
recalls Mr. Cole, a radio D.J. in Columbus, Ohio. "I was taken
aback."
He was less surprised she had unfollowed him -- he had already
unfollowed her -- than that she talked about it. "It's not
commonplace to unfollow someone and then tell them. You just
unfollow them and leave it there," he says.
"I didn't know the rules. Sorry," said his 62-year-old aunt,
Pattie Vanlandingham, when asked about it. "I'm old. I don't know
what to say."
Ms. Vanlandingham, of Stuart, Fla., says she unfollowed her
nephew because she didn't care for posts his friends put up in
response to his tweets. She found them disrespectful to older
generations.
Right after she told the family about unfollowing Mr. Cole, he
tweeted about it from the living room.
"He celebrated it with a little meme with Leonardo DiCaprio" --
in which he's raising a glass -- Ms. Vanlandingham says. "I still
follow his mother, and she liked it, so it shows up on my feed. I
don't think he knew it would."
Facebook and its younger sibling Instagram have introduced more
controls for people who don't necessarily want to cut ties with
other users but do want to see less of them. Instagram in May
launched a "mute" button, which allows users to not see someone's
posts without unfollowing the person.
Facebook's "unfollow" option, less drastic than unfriending,
makes it so you don't see a person's posts in your news feed
anymore. A year ago, Facebook got more nuanced still with a
"snooze" function that hides people's posts for 30 days. There's
also "Take a Break," keeping a person's posts out of your feed and
stopping the person from seeing yours.
Wade Lawrence happened to be thinking about his dad's cousin
when he decided to check her Facebook page. Then he saw it: the
"Add Friend" button.
"I had her as a friend," he says. "She unfriended me."
He suspects she got tired of his habit of posting debatably
funny meme images, sometimes three a week. "She thinks it's spam,"
he says.
Mr. Lawrence, a 24-year-old marketing coordinator from Cape
Town, South Africa, brought it up at his parents' house over
Christmas lunch. He sat next to his cousin, someone he thinks of as
more like an aunt.
"While I was cutting the meat, I basically just told her,
'Auntie, I saw you unfriended me on Facebook.' I just smiled and
winked," he says. "She was shocked, like, her eyes were really
big."
She told him she did it because his posts were inconsistent and
not family-related.
"I said, 'That's all good, Auntie,' " he says. No hard feelings.
"She just ended with a laugh, as if, why would I ask this?"
Ashleigh Simmons, 30, has a group of five childhood friends she
gets together with each year for "Friendsgiving" and
"Friends-Christmas."
A finance manager who lives outside of Forney, Texas, she says
she is in "a little bit of a more liberal state of mind" than most
of East Texas. A friend posted to her Facebook page a clip of
former Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke cutting a
steak.
Ms. Simmons commented on the post with something like, "Yeah, he
can cut my steak."
Her friend's husband replied that he didn't realize she was so
"thirsty" for Mr. O'Rourke. The two went back and forth in the
comments and it got ugly, she says, so she decided to apologize by
leaving a nice comment on a photo of the guy's child. But she
couldn't -- he had unfriended her.
"I was, like, oh, that should make Friends-Christmas really
interesting, " she says.
Though the women have gotten together since then, no one made
plans for their usual holiday gathering with spouses. She thinks
the Facebook fight played a role.
"I just wasn't going to put the effort in helping plan this
year," she says. "I just wasn't feeling it after that."
Ms. Simmons did recently receive a message from her friend about
all getting together in January. "The more time goes, the easier
it'll be for me to act like nothing happened," she says. "I'm sure
that's super-healthy."
Vince Roque, a video producer from Los Angeles, unfollowed a
cousin on Instagram a few years ago because she posted too many of
what he considered passive-aggressive memes.
There would be things like some text saying "you're always there
to help people but when you need them, no one's around," says Mr.
Roque, "and then the woman is standing over a cliff."
At Thanksgiving that year, "Grandma's bringing out the wine and
we're all getting a little tipsy," Mr. Roque says, "and then
basically [the cousin] is like, 'You unfollowed me on Instagram.
How could you do that to me?' "
"I was just honest," he says, adding that he told her: '"You
always post these crappy memes and selfies."'
He agreed to refollow her. It didn't last.
The cousin took a vacation to a lake, and Mr. Roque says she
posted an overwhelming number of selfies.
"Earlier this year I did unfollow her again," he says.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 30, 2018 17:16 ET (22:16 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Twitter (NYSE:TWTR)
Graphique Historique de l'Action
De Juin 2024 à Juil 2024
Twitter (NYSE:TWTR)
Graphique Historique de l'Action
De Juil 2023 à Juil 2024