The Facebook Post Filter

A Facebook friend of mine opened up an interesting discussion yesterday. It had to do with the way some people post trivial things on Facebook, and do so, in her opinion, to excess.

Facebook and other new social media seem to fall outside any conventional rules of etiquette that apply to more traditional means of communication. We sometimes talk about our personal speech filters. The speech filter is the deliberate or intuitive mechanism that helps us decide which of our thoughts to share when speaking and which of our thoughts to leave unspoken. Our speech filter is what prevents us from making negative (or even positive) comments on a person’s appearance in spite of what we might be thinking. It prevents us from making politically incorrect statements. It prevents us from asking the teacher if there will be any homework.

We tune our speech filter differently based upon the setting and the audience. We tune differently when speaking with business colleagues, coworkers, friends, and family. We tune differently when speaking in front of an audience. We tune differently if we are in a public setting such as a restaurant where surrounding people may hear. We tune differently when speaking with children.

But what about the written word? In the case of the written word, we have the luxury of time to think about what we write. Our filters can be more deliberate. We can edit and reedit our written word before anybody else reads it. For example, I had thought about writing two paragraphs up that that our speech filter prevents us from calling somebody ugly. But I chose not to include that example in that paragraph because it might be politically incorrect.

My Facebook friend’s point was that Facebook users have a wide range of filter settings. The question that intrigues me is this. Given that people have time to think before posting on Facebook, what are people’s thought processes? In other words, how do people set their Facebook Post Filters? What makes a thought or event worthy of posting? What are the criteria?

I have three criteria:
1. Should I share this information with my Facebook friends?
2. Will others find this information interesting?
3. Will I offend anybody by posting this information?

The second question is at the heart of my Facebook friend’s point. Most of us have dozens or hundreds of Facebook friends. If we were to restrict our posts to those that we believe would be interesting to all our friends, we wouldn’t be posting much at all. And our perception of what may be interesting may be completely out of sync with that of our Facebook friends. Is this the reason that some people post uninteresting minutia on an hourly basis? Or is it that their filters don’t include question #2?