I put this here since the topic isn't about politics, but about online social activity.
Earlier this week there was an article with an exaggerated assertion that the election of 2016 is killing Facebook. The point was that due to the increase in strong opinions regarding politics, that many people are reducing their Facebook activity or eliminating it altogether. Since the Facebook model is built on people seeing lots of pages and being exposed to lots of advertising, if the average amount of time spent on FB declines so does it ad revenues.
I reviewed my list of friends and found that 192 post no politics or very little politics, and that 42 post a significant amount of politics (for you English majors, that means about 82% of my FB friends don't do politics there, and about 18% do). Like many FB users, if a friend posts a lot of politics I "unfollow" them, no matter their view or how close they are, since I don't want my feed filled up with a lot of politics. So, looking at my numbers, it seems like most people are following a cardinal rule of interacting in social settings and not talking politics on their FB, but a minority are all in (and on both/all sides). Interestingly, a friend posted the above card a couple of years ago, and, of course, now has about a 5-1 ratio of politics to other topics on his page.
To head of this possible major hit to its revenues, FB might figure out a way to encourage users to have a separate politics page and/or create political groups to voice their opinions, so that more people will go back to oohing at baby pictures, laughing at those darn cat videos, and getting excited about the next class reunion.
