Practices of Unfriending between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli Citizens

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the excellent Nik John, presenting a paper co-authored with Aysha Agbarya. Their focus is on Facebookunfriending practices between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. From past studies, we already know that it is especially people with strong political views who unfriend, and such unfriending severs weak ties especially frequently; it also results from encountering unwanted group communication styles or online propaganda, and is used to manage one’s own personal public sphere in social networks.

But how do power relationships affect online tie-breaking practices? Are there dynamics of unfriending that have not yet been identified? It is possible that unfriending is used as a form of ‘punching up’ (attacking the more powerful party) or stepping away (from unwanted relationships) – and that this also reproduces communicative or other inequalities, for instances as minority users remove themselves further from sources of power in society by unfriending representatives of the majority.

Aysha conducted 20 interviews with what the project calls “‘48 Palestinians” (Palestinians who live within the 1948 borders of Israel); these largely have high levels of education, are of diverse religious orientation as well as genders; and aged between 21–37. The group is not generally representative of such ‘48 Palestinians – and this is because of the sensitivities of potential participants in collaborating with research by an Israeli university.

Participants had a strong sense of being under surveillance on Facebook, and this also ties into much broader and persistent concerns about state surveillance; such concerns are quite possibly very well-founded. But they are also concerned about social surveillance conducted by Jewish Israelis, and often practice self-censorship in their expression of attitudes towards the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestinian lands.

Unfriending was also driven by experiences of discrimination by Jewish Israelis, and considered in such incidents as a form of payback or punching up. In other cases, Palestinians encountered trolling by unknown users who may have sought to provoke angry responses that they could then report to the authorities, and in such situations they often stepped away by unfriending that person.

Such unfriending practices between participants of different power levels have yet to be fully theorised in the literature: the price to pay for cutting ties in this way is unequally distributed, and the logic of Facebook (which naively assumes that all participants are equal) actually reproduces that inequality.