Why I love and hate Facebook…

There is so many reasons I love and hate Facebook.  Do you feel the same way as me?

I love that I can easily keep in touch with my family, especially if they are travelling or living interstate.

I love that I can stay in touch with old friends, whom I might otherwise not see for months at a time. Some of them I have caught up with again after many years, and I have also discovered old neighbours again.

I love some of the communities that I belong to, “Starts at 60” is one of them. I also belong to a few fan groups of authors I admire, and I like to keep up with current affairs, and find out about lost dogs etc.

However, what I hate about it are the “haters” themselves.

Those who vilify other commenters on posts about many and varied subjects.

I like to have a debate, but it seems these days that debates have flown out the window. Instead we have people who enjoy being negative about anything that is said, rude and disgusting to the original posters, or who verbally attack other people if they dare to have an opposing opinion.

The ones that I find the most difficult however, are those with such entrenched beliefs about things that no amount of common sense or intelligent information can sway them.

Some of the most divisive issues are those involving people who are pro or against vaccinations. I had a discussion that lasted over 100 comments and still neither side could agree on anything. There are also those who just simply hate anyone who is different and I won’t even get into religious fanatics, the homophobes the climate change deniers and the downright self-righteous.

One positive example is a wonderful story that I came across recently by a lovely young woman who had had body issues all her life. She went to the extreme of working out for hours on end, to achieve what she felt at the time was a perfect body.

Yet, even when she was parading around on stage at body sculpting shows she wasn’t happy.

A few years later this young woman had some babies, and many of us are very aware that it can take quite a while after giving birth for our bodies to bounce back to the way they were pre-pregnancy.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the women on here found that they never did bounce back quite the way we wanted them to.

What this young woman discovered however, was that for the first time in her life she accepted her body.

She enlisted the help of a woman photographer and they produced the most beautiful photos of this young woman, naked and discreet but showing her soft fuller figure.

No, she wasn’t obese, just more curvy and happy and glowing with a mother’s love.

This young woman is now trying to help other woman with body issues to understand that we can all be beautiful, even if we are overweight.

She doesn’t advocate obesity, or being unhealthy, simply accepting yourself for who you are. Accepting that it is unhealthy to constantly compare yourselves to stick-figure women who starve themselves in the name of “beauty”.

I am finally getting to my point folks, hope you are still with me.

What happened when she posted these photos on the internet and the story about the documentary that she is going to produce saddened me deeply.

Many people congratulated her, but so many put her down, called her ugly and gross and obese. So many of them were so ignorant that they were unable to understand why she was doing what she did.

These are the “haters” I was talking about. They weren’t having a debate, they were simply being as nasty as they could be. Judging her for her curves exactly how she used to judge herself.

No amount of reasoning was able to make them understand why this young woman had done what she did.

Then there are those who complain about bad drivers, but I very rarely comment on these anymore, there’s enough rage on the road without having to deal with it online as well.

Do you feel people misuse social media and Facebook in particular? Have you come across bad behaviour on Facebook? How do you deal with it?