INSTANCES of minds being changed during a furious Facebook debate are a bit like yowie sightings - rare and easily disproved.
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Social media has evolved from its earlier, idealistic incarnations (remember how it was going to bring us all together?) into a battleground for the certain and the sure, the vociferous and the virtuous (on both sides of politics).
There are shades of grey in every debate, but there is something about social media - the immediacy, the potential for anonymity, the way it groups like minds - that seems to encourage hard, definite, aggressively defended positions.
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We were promised the democratisation of opinion, that a thousand voices would bloom, but what happens when all of those voices are shouting at once and no-one's able to listen?
And if someone does listen, who's opinion ever gets changed during a slanging match between strangers, anyway?
Who ever admits to seeing a contentious topic differently after their bloody, drawn-out battle in the comments section?
Lamenting the loss of civility on these platforms is easily dismissed as backward-looking - like the cliched curmudgeon who complains about the shiftless youth of today or wants to explain how much better things were 50 years ago.
But we need to be careful that we don't normalise insults and name-calling and public shaming and instant fury and astounding rudeness and all the other weapons in the social media armoury.
They aren't legitimate debating topics. They're not even acceptable social behaviour.
A sneer is not a rebuttal and a slur is not a means of resting your case. Whipping up an online mob is cruel, no matter the result you're seeking.
Calling every politician who offends you "corrupt" and every public figure who upsets you a "disgrace" might be momentarily satisfying, but it ultimately strips these words of their meaning through over-use.
We don't all have to get along on social media - we don't all get along in real life, so it's an impossible dream to imagine we're going to do so from behind our glowing screen.
But where we have managed, over time, to use hard laws and soft social etiquette to keep us from brawling and battering each other in our physical streets, on social media, unfortunately, anything still goes.