‘Vote for Romney and I’ll unfriend you’: why I won’t debate politics on Facebook

On July 4, 2009, the day Sarah Palin announced that she would step down from the Governorship of Alaska, the perfect quip popped into my head. As we are wont to do in this age of social media, I immediately logged onto my Facebook account and typed the most famous line from Gerald Ford’s inauguration speech into the status update box: ‘Our long national nightmare is over.’

Minutes later, a distant acquaintance (the older brother of a high school friend with whom I had long ago fallen out of touch), posted a comment that I found surprising given what I knew (from earlier Facebook comment discussions) to be his radically left-wing political views. ‘Look, I completely disagree with most of Palin’s politics,’ he wrote in the way of political throat clearing. ‘But can we at least applaud the fact that unlike 90 per cent of Americans, she chose to keep Trig rather than killing him in the womb? She made the right decision, she struck a blow for the culture of life, and she deserves our praise for that regardless of what our politics may be.