Study and Scripture

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of conflict in online communications. Social media is filled with heated conversations from passionately opposing viewpoints. Sometimes, even just posting a picture or making a post about how your day went will invite strangers to accost you. I distinctly remember a time when one of my Facebook friends asked a question, and I answered—and one of my friend’s friends, whom I didn’t know, posted a short essay about how my life would never amount to anything and I didn’t know anything about the way the world worked.

A solution I frequently see offered up on this anxiety-inducing problem is to stay away from divisive topics when posting on social media. You frequently hear about people taking breaks from social media for their mental health, and many of my friends have said they’ve quit posting their moral and political thoughts on social media because of the backlash they may receive.

One person’s experience changed my mind on this tactic. I had a friend who had resolved to keep out of political and moral conversations on social media, and instead talked about her job as a designer for IBM. She gathered a good number of followers through her career posts, which is expected, as she was very good at her job. However, despite her best efforts to avoid controversy, despite going out of her way to avoid divisive topics, she still regularly received hateful posts and even threats. And even when she herself was not accosted, she saw many others talking about people like her with vitriol and disdain, and when that’s everywhere, it’s hard not to internalize it. She eventually deleted all of her social media accounts, as that was the only way to escape from the hate and threats.

My designer friend was Mexican-American—she was born in Texas, but her parents had immigrated before she was born. And her story was extremely common, in an era where people like her are branded rapists and drug dealers and talked about as a group that needs to be removed from our country. Any time my friend was attacked, either directly or indirectly, my silence spoke far louder than any comment I made on her posts.

In the same way, I watched many of my friends describe a politician they didn’t like as “clearly mentally ill,” and then I watched others talk about how dangerous people with mental illness are and how they needed to be monitored for the public’s safety. I have a serious mental illness. I knew the facts and the statistics, and I knew how they didn’t actually support what these people were saying—but I still watched people, time and time again, argue that I shouldn’t have the same rights that they have because of my medical condition.

Being able to unplug, to step away from politics for our mental health, is an enormous privilege—one that many others do not have, because their very existence has been politicized. If you’re attacked on social media for your ideas, but not for your identity, that’s a privilege many do not have. As many others have said before me, privilege is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. If you see hate, especially hateful misinformation, bear in mind not only what’s at stake if you speak up, but what’s at stake if you don’t. If your friends consistently see your silence in the face of their persecution, that can speak volumes about your view of them even if you don’t intend it.