Do you hate all your friends’ updates on Facebook? That’s actually why you enjoy the site

·Contributor

25 July 2017 at 5:00 am

There’s a lot of reasons to hate Facebook – all the gloating couples boasting about their love, the gym selfies, the ‘inspiring’ memes.

But that actually might be the reason we all enjoy it – because it gives us an excuse to ‘hate watch’ our friends, according to Open University researchers.

Researchers interviewed 100 Facebook users – and found that many of them had had seriously negative experiences (but didn’t stop using Facebook).

One wrote: ‘I wrote to a friend about how my two-year-old was counting to 40 and was saying the alphabet in three languages. This made a Facebook contact write passive aggressively on her wall about overachieving parents who spend all their time bragging about their children.

Philip Seargeant, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University says: ‘None of the people in the study, however, said that they’d reduced their use of Facebook because of the frequent offence they experienced from using it.

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Instead, we can speculate, it’s this opportunity to be slightly judgemental about the behaviour of your acquaintances that proves one of the compelling draws of the site.

Similar to the “hate-watching” experience of viewing television programmes you don’t like because you enjoy mocking them, this can be seen as a mild form of “hate-reading”.

‘Logging onto Facebook gives you the chance to be indignantly offended (or maybe just mildly piqued) by other people’s ill-informed views and idiosyncratic behaviour. And there’s a surprising amount of pleasure in that.’

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