Repertoires of Unfriending in Times of Crisis

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Gregory Asmolov, who begins by discussing the strange experience of reconnecting with old school friends on social media: do we really want to find out about their political, ideological, societal views? Would we rather disconnect from them again? And if we do so, do we publicly announce that disconnection?

Such public discourses of disconnection might even be understood as disconnective violence – and crisis situations (in addition to bringing people together) can also lead to a wave of disconnections between people on different sides of a given crisis. State institutions can in turn exploit such processes by inserting themselves into the connective vacuum that such disconnection opens up.

This project, then, begins by identifying disconnective speech acts that publicly announce the break-up of the relation with another person; the contexts here are COVID-19 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over time, in both cases several waves of disconnection can be observed, and these are sometimes actively driven by posters who encourage their followers to disconnect if they disagree with the poster’s own views. Russia’s 9 May World War II victory celebrations, used to spread propaganda against Ukraine, serve as one example here: followers are encouraged to disconnect if they disagree with such propaganda; posters keep track of the number of disconnections received; and posters actively unfriendly critical voices themselves. This also expresses as a kind of disconnective vigilantism, peer-pressuring others into unfriending their followers with divergent views.

There is a whole repertoire of such disconnective acts, then: announcing unfriending, warning about unfriending, encouraging unfriending, encouraging others to unfriend their followers, and asking followers in a poll whether a certain connection should be unfriended. Such disconnecting can then also enforce more homogeneous networks that make the intrusion of diverging opinions less likely, which benefits propaganda actors.