Democratic consultant Brent Blackaby’s relationship with his conservative uncle had survived the controversies of the George W. Bush administration and weathered chain emails from his relative positing that President Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim.

What it couldn’t take was Donald Trump.


Soon after the Republican presidential nominee suggested last week what “Second Amendment people” could do to stop Hillary Clinton, Blackaby severed Facebook ties with his Trump-backing uncle, and in the process got into a nasty name-calling spat that consumed parents, siblings, cousins and anyone else following along in his 2,300-friend social network.

“Seriously, what kind of crack are you smoking?” he wrote after his uncle in Scottsdale, Arizona, surfaced conspiracy theories about a secret Democratic plan to form a “one world government,” part of a three-day social-media firestorm (excerpts of the exchange below).

This was the awkward Thanksgiving dinner conversation about politics everyone is warned to avoid, only this time it played out in the far-from-private forum of Facebook. Blackaby’s family spat wasn’t the first, either. Not by a long shot.

The Silicon Valley behemoth says more than 100 million Americans this year have generated 4 billion posts, likes, comments and shares about the presidential campaign and in the process prompted all manner of hand wringing and division among users more accustomed to glorious ignorance about their friends’ political opinions.

Facebook says it doesn’t have data about how many people have been unfriended, hidden or just plain muted because of their postings about the election. But the anecdotal evidence is clear: People are growing more uncomfortable with so much online sharing about politics this cycle, and many are looking for an off ramp by winnowing down their feeds.

“Each of these issues leads to very heated discussion, and oftentimes people want to tune out the other side on social media and would prefer to watch Olympic memes and videos of squirrels riding water skis,” said Vincent Harris, a Republican digital strategist who earlier this summer briefly worked for Trump’s campaign and acknowledged he had recently unfollowed someone from his church because he’d had enough of their anti-Trump posts.

“After all, isn't it easier to just de-friend people than actually have to engage with facts to back up our beliefs?” he added.

There are many reasons the 2016 campaign has become synonymous with unfriending, starting with Facebook’s ever-growing popularity. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now use the social network each month, about a 20 percent increase from four years ago during the rather vanilla-by-comparison contest between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Cellphones are also faster and less expensive, making it that much simpler for everyone to scroll through their feeds no matter where they are, easily share the news stories they find interesting and post irreverent comments without a solid understanding of their privacy settings and just how far and wide their posts will be seen.

“We've created an environment ripe for disagreements,” said Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, a Fordham University professor who studies the relationship between technology and politics.

The online squeamishness is also exacerbated because of where many Americans now reside on the political spectrum. The country isn’t just divided into red states and blue states. Several recent studies show that people even within their own communities are traveling in ideological packs and seeking out news that reinforces their views. One example, a Pew Research Center report released earlier this month, found that nearly half of Clinton’s supporters and a third of Trump’s backers had no close friends backing the other candidate.

“This is part of a larger trend where we're becoming a more divided country,” said Democratic pollster Margie Omero. “These aren't just polite policy disagreements, but deep cultural divides. For many, Trump's caustic talk, and growing dissatisfaction with politics in general, is making this divide even sharper and more personal."

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said the proliferation of Facebook fights and other uncomfortable interactions are essentially the “result of what these voters feel is a broken political system that nominates the two most unpopular candidates in the history of presidential campaigns.”

It’s a trend that he said has been exacerbated by the recent surge in partisan politics and the disintegration of mainstream media supplying most Americans with their political news. “Voters are not exposed to ‘the other side’ as they were decades ago,” he said, adding that it makes them even more polarized and less tolerant of opposing ideas.

“That gets us to social media, where people post their political views for all to see. In a political environment as heated as it is right now, with voters as polarized as they are on the two political parties and the two presidential candidates, it’s not surprising that we hear voters talk about un-friending others,” Newhouse said.

Newhouse insisted Trump doesn’t deserve all the blame, but others say the rookie presidential contender is the reason that Facebook users are going the extra mile to filter out what comes across their feeds. It’s Trump, after all, who says he has engaged millions of Americans in a political process they’d previously ignored, and many of them are now going public for the first time with their views, in particular on social media.

And when Trump supporters declare their support for their candidate on Facebook, many on the left say they’re apt to be offended, even if it is just to see who inside their social network is enthused by the Republican’s campaign rhetoric.

“Certainly as a brown Muslim person, it’s harder for me to see people say, ‘Hey, I like what Trump stands for’ and not feel like what you’re saying is you don’t really like me around,” said Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

The best way to understand Trump’s effect on how people are engaging on Facebook may be to pretend he isn’t even in the 2016 race.

“Let’s say it was Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton, it’d be a very standard boring election,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “You’d have a center-left and a center-right candidate and not disagreeing with the things that would get people upset. I don’t think people would be calling Bush a crazy racist and xenophobe.”

To be sure, the phenomenon of unfriending people on Facebook is not a new one. Researchers have been examining the topic alongside the rise during the past decade of new social networks. In 2012, the Pew Research Center found 18 percent of users to sites like Facebook had blocked, unfriended or hidden someone because of their political posts. The same study also said liberals were about twice as likely to take steps to block, unfriend or hide their friends’ postings, compared with moderates and conservatives.

A fuller body of research on what Trump has done to those metrics remains a work in progress. Pew officials said they haven’t yet asked those questions. In a survey conducted earlier this summer, Patrick Miller, a political science assistant professor at the University of Kansas, found 7 percent of respondents had unfriended someone over their political posts, while 20 percent replied that they’d blocked or hidden a status update — something that is not detectable to the offender — that they disagreed with. More than half of his 1,020 respondents said they just ignore the uncomfortable posts.

Recent media reports are full of examples of people giving their Facebook friends the heave-ho because of what they’re saying about the 2016 campaign. BuzzFeed in December even published a step-by-step instruction manual on “how to delete your Facebook friends who like Donald Trump.” Last week, the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union published the results of an online poll that found a third of the nearly 300 respondents unfollow someone because of their political posts, rather than take the extra and more public step of straight-up unfriending them.

Facebook, which declined comment for this story, has no doubt helped foment all of the political discussions through a business model that includes prominent placement of news articles inside its users’ feeds. The company has even made recent tweaks to its algorithm to play up the stories that are posted by others inside their own social network. “That’s why for various reasons they get into trouble,” a source at a rival company said when asked about the rise of unfriending anecdotes tied to the current presidential campaign.

Defenders of Facebook counter that the phenomenon may be overblown; there are still no hard figures backing up a significant shift away from political postings compared with previous election cycles. Besides, they say, the recent statistics that Facebook provided about engagement this cycle — 4 billion likes, shares, posts and comments between Jan. 1 and Aug. 1 — would suggest people aren’t ignoring Trump or Clinton or any of the presidential campaign news. They also note that while Americans are known to complain about political advertising on television, they don’t stop watching their favorite shows either.

The presidential campaigns themselves don’t seem to mind if their most fervent supporters are brushed off on Facebook. Someone on a social network speaking up on the virtues of Clinton or Trump, no matter how unpopular the candidates may be, often can serve as a potent surrogate. And the unfriending also provides some instant feedback for candidates in determining whether a specific message is resonating or not.

“There is the risk of muting or defriending, but in most cases that's probably not a person the campaign was too concerned of losing as a ‘friend’ on Facebook,” said Chris Wilson, a former senior research and analytics strategist for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. “It's the bandwagon effect too, particularly if the candidate you support is winning or perceived more positively — then it is easier to get others to want to be a part of that effort in a public way.”

As for Blackaby and his uncle, Phillip Mullard, their very public Facebook spat remains a sore subject.

“I love my uncle, we're family, but this is way bigger than politics or candidates to me,” Blackaby said in an interview. “This is about a fundamental disagreement about worldviews, how we treat and respect people, how we honor the political process.”

Mullard, a lifelong Republican and retired commercial real estate broker from Scottsdale, Arizona, told POLITICO that he wasn’t surprised to end up in a disagreement with his liberal nephew over the 2016 campaign. But he did call it a “little unusual” to experience such a public Facebook pile on, including a meme that one of his nephew’s friends posted of his face cropped next to a pig’s rear end and Blackaby’s father labeling him a “fool” for backing Trump.

Blackaby’s uncle said he doesn’t regret his remarks posted on Facebook but hopes his nephew would think twice about going as far as unfriending him. “That’s how we keep in touch,” he said.

See excerpts of the Blackaby exchange below:

