Fighting on Facebook: Political Conversations Between Strong and Weak Ties

Abstract

Most Facebook users have observed a heated disagreement on the site, or been involved in such a disagreement themselves. Why do we get into these disagreements and who are we fighting with? Are we learning anything from the disagreements we have online? In this research, we interviewed eighteen regular Facebook users about their experiences with conflict on the site. We found that people get into disagreements online because their \textit{expectations} about how the people in their network will react were violated. Conflict was often a result not of disagreement, but of breach of expectations. When conflict ensued, participants sometimes dissolved their relationship with their argument counterpart, and sometimes did not. We review strategies used for relationship maintenance. Weak-tie relationships were more susceptible to being dissolved, and strong-tie relationships were often salvaged by "agreeing to disagree" or ceasing political discussion. Participants report sometimes learning from these hard conversations, but not often. We follow-up with design recommendations for social media platforms that could help mitigate disagreements or give people access to tools that help them have productive, hard conversations.