Freddie de Boer, a social liberal, on how social media has ruined social liberalism. Excerpt:

It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing, or if someone decides to misrepresent what you said as saying the wrong thing. There are so many ways to step on a land mine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks.

More:

Suppose you’re a young college student inclined towards liberal or left-wing ideas. And suppose, like a lot of such college students, you enjoy Stephen Colbert and find him a political inspiration. Now imagine that, during the #CancelColbert fiasco, you defended Colbert on Twitter. If your defense was noticed by the people who police that forum, the consequences were likely to be brutal. People would not have said “here, let me talk you through this.” It wouldn’t have been a matter of friendly and inviting disagreement. Instead, as we all saw, it would have been immediate and unequivocal attack. That’s how the loudest voices on Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook act. The culture is one of attack, rather than of education. And the claims, typically, are existential: not “this thing you said is problematic from the standpoint of race,” but rather “you’re a racist.” Not “I think there’s some gender issues going here that you should think about,” but “you’re a misogynist.”

Read the whole thing. It’s smart. It explains why I quit following Twitter (though I still tweet links to my blog posts), and very rarely, if ever, engage with Facebook, and then only on the most innocuous topics. There is lots of risk, and no reward.

Matthew Lee Anderson says this is equally true of conservative social media. And he takes it further, speculating on whether the social-mediaization of life makes normal relationships impossible:

The intellectual environment such juxtapositions create blurs any distinction between personal and public, which makes it more difficult to disentangle the disagreements I have with my friends about (say) social policies regarding marriage from my friendships themselves.   This is particularly true with people that I have not seen much, like friends from undergrad.  I’m not generally one to shy away from conflict.  But with what feels like so many minor conflicts and disagreements going all the time, attrition simply takes over and I lose my appetite for the conversation.  Those are people I’m supposed to be friends with, or at least friendly with, after all, but perpetual, pervasive disagreement at even a cheerful level is corrosive to that.

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I believe he’s really onto something. I don’t like going to social events where I don’t know people, and I struggle to work up the interest in going to some of them where I do know people. Why? Because I don’t want to argue about something I posted on this blog. And people do want to argue. Not everybody, but all it takes is one or two, and you end up regretting that you ever left the house. So I don’t leave the house much, and I’ve dug this hole for myself by being an opinion journalist and blogger. Social media only makes the kind of thing people in my line of work have been dealing with for a long time a problem that extends beyond professional opinion-mongers.

People who don’t really know you assume that you are nothing more than the sum total of all the opinions you’ve posted on your blog, or on Twitter, or on Facebook.There is in reality a separation of blog and life; this blog represents some of the things I think about — at least the things I think about that I figure more than a few people will be interested in, usually because they’re in the news. In 95 percent of my personal conversations, politics and cultural conflict never come up. That’s what I do at work. I don’t like talking about them as a general rule.

When I lived and worked in DC, I found that older Washingtonians (that is, people older than about 35) had matured past the ideological ardor of youth, and had come to understand that there’s usually more to people than their politics. It’s how Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy became good friends. Freddie de Boer writes:

If you are a young person who is still malleable and subject to having your mind changed, and you decide to engage with socially liberal politics online, what are you going to learn immediately? Everything that you like is problematic. Every musician you like is misogynist. Every movie you like is secretly racist. Every cherished public figure has some deeply disqualifying characteristics. All of your victories are the product of privilege. Everyone you know and love who does not yet speak with the specialized vocabulary of today’s social justice movement is a bad, bad person.

Again, I recognize that there is a parallel form of policing discourse among conservatives, so I’m not singling liberalism out here. We’re talking about how the online conversation works. The line of Freddie’s that gets to me the most is how these puritans demand that even something as elementally human as love must be subject to the rigid boundaries of political correctness.

I can think of right-wing people I dearly love who hold views on race that I believe to be immoral. I can think of left-wing people I love who are unapologetic bigots on the subject of Christianity. I still love them, because I know something about their finer qualities, and find that the greater part of them draws my affection, and usually too my admiration. By now, we know what to talk about, and what not to talk about, when we’re together. This is how normal people, and normal communities, operate. We offer each other grace, because we know how much we depend on it ourselves.

Social media makes that difficult to maintain. When I look at my Facebook feed, I see people I know personally to be wonderful folks sometimes sending out obnoxious political or religious messages — things they would think twice, or three times, about saying in person. I find myself wondering if I would have been friends with this or that person if our conversations had been so unfiltered as we were getting to know each other. As bad as Facebook is, Twitter is even worse. Recently, I began using it only to send out links to my stuff on the blog. I quit reading replies, or threads on which I’m mentioned, and am working myself around to the point of unfollowing nearly everyone (same with Facebook). Not only does it often show people at their worst, but it also tempts me to be just as short, sharp, and sarcastic in reply.

Some things really are better less unsaid. Social media can be so antisocial. Look, I don’t think social media is all bad. I just think that you’re better off using it sparingly.