We’ve all cut the cord on someone for a dodgy Facebook status about UKIP or religion. You’re scrolling your timeline and up comes a low-key Tory from High School sharing a post from the Conservatives page. Delete.

Apparently we all do it a lot. A new study published in the Journal of Communication, called “I Don’t Like You Anymore,” suggests that unfriendings that are politically motivated are a “new kind of political gesture”.

Testing that theory, Nicholas John of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Shira Dvir-Gvirsman of Tel Aviv University conducted an online survey among Jewish Israeli Facebook users – just 10 days after the Israel-Gaza conflict’s open-ended ceasefire on August 26, 2014. The survey included results from 1,103 respondents. What did they find? That 16% of study participants unfriended a friend based on political comments. That’s quite a considerable number if you think about how often you really take the plunge and do it on a, say, weekly basis.

“People unfriend people who have different political views to theirs," John told the PsyPost. “We already know that Facebook and search engines provide us with a feed and search results that are tailored to us. By unfriending we are further contributing to the formation of echo chambers and filter bubbles. More than that, these findings suggest that the people most likely to unfriend are younger, more politically active, more active on Facebook, have lots of Facebook friends, and have more extreme political views — these are important people in online discussions.”

This unfriending is part of our wider attitude towards politics we find distasteful online and there are positives and negatives to this. On the one hand, why should we be “friends” with someone who is spreading hate? Your own social media spaces are customisable for a reason: they are your space. However, there is the risk of your timeline becoming an echo chamber, friends with the same views as you repeating and supporting each other. How do you grow and learn in this environment? People will always have views differing from yours and it’s annoying but necessary to debate and accommodate them from time to time. 

What do you think? Do you unfriend people for political views?