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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 31, 2018 15:11 ET (20:11 GMT)

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