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Just think of it like spam email: it costs nothing to send and it costs nothing to ignore. :)</p>
<p>Really, that’s the beauty of cyberspace. In decades past, people expressed hatred of groups of people by lynching them. Now they just write strongly worded comments on websites.</p>
<p>lightingmom, it’s a post on Facebook. Sure it might be something extremely offensive to a group, but what can you do? Why must you do something? It’s not worth the time to go preaching to a friend over a post. I see stupid things on Facebook all the time. I’ve learned to pick my battles and a Facebook post ain’t worth it.</p>
<p>^^halogen- I must disagree. It actually costs us everything as a society to ignore Hate. Signing off this forum.</p>
<p>I find that being ignored is a more painful reprimand than being rebuked. Cyberspace is governed by the attention economy, wherein the most precious resource is the time a person spends observing and interacting with one person or one thing instead of another. Someone who posts something inflammatory and gets people to read it and reply to it becomes wealthier in the attention economy regardless of the content of the reply. On Facebook, replying to something causes it to appear in more places: your timeline and your friends’ newsfeeds. This advertises the hater’s written product to even more potential consumers.</p>
<p>This is the same principle of ads and spam. Send the same worthless email to a million recipients or pay a million webmasters to embed your Flash object on their sites, and as long as one person clicks on the link in it, you’ve made a net gain. Spammers regularly find that they don’t make nearly as much money selling fraudulent products as they make selling [lists</a> of email addresses of people who were fooled](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_list]lists”>Sucker list - Wikipedia) to other spammers. People pay for attention.</p>
<p>In principle and in effect, the most effective way to minimize the impact of an idea in cyberspace is to give it no attention.</p>
<p>The people with the best netiquette are those who understand the attention economy and can distinguish between sincere invitations to discussion and attempts to garner attention by offending people. It never hurts to have thick skin, either.</p>
<p>Halogen- i agree with you and your suggestions are not new information. Apparently you did not read the precipitating post as you appear to have missed this in the OP initial query. The offensive cartoon/remark was posted by his/her “friend” and the OP was not referring to some random posting or cyberspamming. The OP was asking whether/how to respond to their friend’s conduct.</p>
<p>It’s all the same. Random spammer or Facebook friend, someone’s opinion in cyberspace doesn’t matter if no one cares about it. You might as well pretend that it doesn’t exist because its existence doesn’t matter. The only victims of “misconduct” are those who choose to waste their attention or have no escape from bullying. The only enmity exists between people who decide to be each others’ enemies. The polite and effective way to deal with someone on Facebook who combines edifying content with hateful content is to form an edifying relationship from the good and to avoid making the bad a part of the relationship in the first place.</p>
<p>The point of your first post is that silence implicitly condones something you disagree with and I’m saying the opposite: being ignored hurts and is discouraging.</p>
<p>I’d call her out on that, but I always call out the idiocy I see on my feed.</p>