ABSTRACT
It has been argued that by allowing users to unfriend, unfollow, and block political and cultural “others,” Facebook may discourage dialogue between the members of different cultural groups. Using a case study of a civil confrontation in Ukraine, the chapter discusses two main reasons for unfriending cultural “others” reported by 494 survey respondents. First, the respondents saw communication not as a two-way flow of opinion exchange, but as an imposition of their “truth” on “opponents,” imagined as objects of persuasion or correction. Second, the respondents avoided online communication out of suspicion that their “interlocutors” were trolls with political agendas.
