[kurtosis]

Isn't it also possible that facebook could be used for the promotion of hate? An obvious and outstanding recent example was the recent quiz about whether the U.S. president should be killed. If you read about the balkans, (and more recently iraq) what is shocking is how quickly cultures with cross-ethnic/religous connections - even those as strong as intermarriage can quickly become polarized into bitter enemies. Which makes me wonder what these graphs of israel/palestine friendships will look like when tensions again escalate between these two groups. What did the india/pakistan graph look like after the Mumbai bombings?

[unalone]

Looking at it from a broader perspective, Facebook is the promotion of communication manifest. It strives very hard, in fact, to be a neutral medium, in which no one type of conversation is favored over another, so conversation ranges from flirting to intense debate.

The question is, does prolonged communication lead to more peace or more hate? My bet: In the short term, more hate, because there'll be a lot of people getting in fights over issues they didn't know existed. (I lost a lot of Palin-supporting friends last year.) In the long run, however, more open communication leads to us understanding each other better, and only good can come of that.

[kurtosis]

Yeah I agree - without any evidence I would expect it to be neutral. But I think that there is a pretty well documented tendency for people to be much more aggressive and extreme on online forums than there are in real life. (Similar to road rage) Back in the day I remember reading littlegreenfootballs and being shocked at some of the hateful rhetoric which was in the comments (of course left leaning sites have this too)

[unalone]

That's what I mean by short-term rage. As much as you think people accept you for who you are and what you think, when you express yourself online you realize that most people are awful and immature in a handful of ways. But past that point you develop some self-consciousness and, more often than not, come out of the social parts of the Internet a lot smarter, wittier, and more savvy than you used to be. I can't wait to see that happen on a mass scale.