I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?
Obviously there is a lot of room for skepticism as to whether you think the approach works in practice, or if the approach is simply a front to enact changes that will nominally benefit the unempowered but in reality benefit the empowered. But I don't know of many who aren't in favor of something as vague as "helping people", and most genuinely believe they are doing so.
Nothing of this sort has by any means been proven.
I’m from a country that probably has one of the highest—if not the highest—proportion of children born outside of marriage. I my self is raised by a single mother, my sister has a son born outside of marriage, and so do many of my friends. This country is also one of the wealthiest in the world and has way less poverty then many countries where child rearing outside of marriage is less common.
In fact you could probably argue just as easily that actively supporting single parents has greater economic benefits then to disenfranchise them.