On Facebook, Bullies ‘Like’ if You Hate
My little brother went to school on a Friday morning last June, and this is what he heard: That another boy, a sixth-grader, had written a Facebook status the previous night asking his friends to “like” it if they hated my brother. The “like if you hate” question, the last time this informant had checked, had gotten 57 thumbs-up. Verification for my brother’s generation - the younger half of my own - is a statistical rat race, counted in friends, followers, re-tweets and re-pins. On an ordinary Friday morning, my brother learned that his name had garnered 57 “like if you hates.”
This is a hard thing for me to imagine: 57 likes for a hate - a hate for a person, a little boy, my little brother. But it’s more macroscopic, too. There is a marked difference between how my half-generation and my brother’s engages with and approaches the Internet. I remember dial-up and still have my AOL.com e-mail address (it’s basically a giant spam folder, now). I weed through my Facebook friends weekly, de-friending those whose names I don’t remember or maybe never really knew. I have friends with separate work and personal Twitter accounts and those who take weekends off from the Web. We deal with the Internet with separation. It is a tool to be used and put away.