You still use Facebook?

It seems like a decent amount of people deleted their accounts because of social media toxicity, or they didn’t want to interact with their mother-in-law, or for other, similar reasons. The platform certainly has seen better days, but I’m still on there for the baby and dog photos. And at least you personally know the assholes you’re arguing with, which isn’t always the case on Twitter and Instagram.

Monday night, we stumbled across the perfect example of toxic Facebook interaction. It exists in the form of a Flyers post, which contained a simple message of equality:

Nothing crazy, right? Just a message for equal rights, and yet there are 1,900 replies, which, admittedly, you’re never supposed to read in the first place.

But we did, and here’s a sampling of the intellectual discourse that took place in response:

So yeah, that was a taste of the response on Facebook. It’s kind of a lose/lose for the Flyers, because the team had a terrible year and fans are annoyed with everything. Then here comes a harmless LGBTQ post and you’ve got almost 2,000 replies, with people asking for a focus on hockey and a winning product and all of that, with some homophobia interspersed.

Now, the funny thing is that the team did the exact same post on Twitter, and these were the top three replies:

Can’t please anybody, eh?

To review:

The Flyers did an innocuous social media post promoting the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia. A lot of Facebook fans were pissed off and asked them to “stick to sports.” On Twitter, ACAB accounts ripped them for having an affiliation with Chic-fil-A. Then it spiraled into arguing and toxicity and all of that stuff.

This is a fantastic example of the social media cesspool right here. A brilliant case study. Take this episode and put it into a future college curriculum – “How Social Media Turned to Shit 101.”