I am into genealogy.
What this means is I often spend time reading old small town newspapers.
One of the things that surprised me (while it shouldn’t have but I just did not think about it) was that they all have pages of local for want of a better term, “gossip”.
The newspapers reported on everything going on in town. Besides who is getting married, or new babies, there are also items on who is going where to visit whom. Or, who is in town visiting the family.
It dawned on me these newspapers were the 1900s version of facebook, or more likely, facebook is the 21st century of the small town newspaper.
Facebook allows people to share what is going on in their life even when they are hundreds (if not thousands of miles between them).
Facebook is just a tool, do some people use it poorly, of course. But it also provides a service that people want. You don’t want to use it, no body is going to make you. your choice.
I have a couple. Most of my Facebook friends are family or from church, who don’t generally post political stuff that irritates me, but I have a couple of friends who go off the deep end pretty regularly. I ignore a lot of it, unless it gets to be an every day thing. One of them is rabidly anti-gun; I don’t even own a gun, but after some event that set her off I finally got annoyed enough to respond to absolutely every anti-gun post with the actual study and the actual facts.
I’ve argued with her in real life so I was pretty sure she’d blow up, then drop the whole subject, so long as I stayed cool and insisted on facts rather than emotions, which seems to have happened. That, or she’s hiding her anti-gun posts from me (dunno if that’s possible or not).
Did the same with the other one when she was going nuts about Ferguson. Neither one has unfriended me, rather to my surprise, but they quit posting so much political stuff after getting swatted with enough facts.
My in-laws just unfriend me when I do that. Either way, not much of a problem anymore. :D
Wife uses it and when she "shares" with me, I'm glad I decided to forgo the "pleasures" of intrusive social media.