Revisionist History?

As best as I can recall, the only time I have deleted a comment on one of my Facebook posts was if the person used profanity, was abusive, or stated something that was outright false or heretical. I don’t believe I have ever removed a comment simply because someone disagreed with me, or even if they made an argument against my stated position that I couldn’t easily refute (in other words, I don’t delete comments to save my own reputation).

Over the past week, I was involved in a discussion in the comment thread on a political post. I had been in a back-and-forth with a few people, and after the 3rd or 4th day, I took a break from reading and responding, as I wanted to guard my spirit and not allow myself to get overly worked up or feel the need to adamantly defend my views. I took this break even though I had email notifications that this or that person had mentioned me in a comment, and I knew they were participants in that discussion thread.

This morning before work, I clicked on the links in the notification emails, just to see what people had written in reply to my own comments.

One of the comments I saw was by the person whose original post had generated the discussion. He was responding to a comment I had made to one of his previous comments tagging me. However, my response to which he was responding was no longer visible in the thread. Now, it’s his original post, and so he’s free to manage the comments on it as he sees fit. But it seems he’s not really interested in honest dialogue if he replies to one of my comments, yet deletes my comment he is responding to. Anyone else who comes along and read the thread will only get one side of the conversation.

The second email notification said that another individual had mentioned me in the comments on that thread. I could not find any comments tagging me by this other individual made around the date/time the email notification was sent. The only comments I saw from that person were ones I had previously seen and read that predated the notification by at least several hours.

But then I noticed that the thread only had 25 comments. Thinking that maybe Facebook wasn’t showing all comments, but only “most relevant,” I made sure that “All” was selected. Still only 25 comments. I refreshed the browser, and selected “All” again. Still only 25 comments. Looking through them all, I noticed that not only was my first comment on the original post missing, but so was the entire series of replies back and forth under my first comment. It was as if that part of the conversation had never taken place.

Again, it’s my friend’s Facebook page, and he’s free to remove comments if he wants to. But it seems somewhat dishonest, and unethical in regards to open discourse, to delete pushback simply because it disagrees with your position, or the arguments being made possibly weakening your own position (especially when the meme he initially posted was rather inflammatory, and he should expect some disagreement to come back in response), when none of the comments included profanity, obscenity, or name-calling.

The ironic thing about this whole situation is that this friend is basically performing revisionist history – removing and hiding data that doesn’t agree with his narrative – yet I know he would be one of the first to complain about people to the left of him doing the same thing when it comes to American history.