New year resolutions are like gift wrap: you greet them with eager fervour and then either discard them or store them in a drawer for recycling. But there’s one resolution which you should keep. Not because it makes you thinner, fitter and more productive: rather, it’s because it makes you happy.

Purging your list of Facebook friends is a therapeutic start to the new year. But why the great cleansing? Well, first of all because honestly, you cannot have that many friends. Back in the 1990s, Oxford University Professor Robin Dunbar developed a theory that even the most sociable of us cannot manage more than 150 friends. Some years ago, Professor Dunbar applied his theory to social media: his research showed that even when people have thousands of Facebook friends, they only maintain contact with an inner circle of around 150 friends.

While in the real world, we probably convey negativity through body language and speech tone, in the virtual world, we can only use words

The second and more important reason for purging your list of Facebook friends is that you don’t really need all that negativity in your life. Just log on to Facebook right now and see the activity on your wall. Someone is grumbling about the weather, another is fast and furiously hounding anything that clicks and moves, and two friends have ganged up against an unknown third for having the gall to express a different opinion than theirs. And all is played against an angry chorus. It’s like a modern version of witch trials, when women who spoke to their cat or had a large pimple on their nose were tortured and burned.

But why are people so negative on social media? Whether on Facebook, Twitter or in online comments, we say things to each other, and to strangers, that we would never say face to face. And it’s not because the safety of our own house or the barricade of our computer screen gives us extra courage: after all, we’re not anonymous on Facebook. So is there something about the virtual world that makes us forget our manners? Maybe it’s the lack of inhibition and physical distance that makes us meaner.

It could also be that technology has developed at such a fast pace that manners haven’t caught up yet. We all have a social media account, but we still don’t know how to behave: maybe we need more time to hone our online social skills.

Then there is the fact that while in the real world, we probably convey negativity through body language and speech tone, in the virtual world, we can only use words: this means that we might compensate for the fact that we cannot use gestures by being verbally ruder.

So many theories, yet as usual, the truth is somewhere in between. Actually, the truth is probably much simpler: that people who are nasty on social media are nasty in real life. In which case, you don’t need them as friends. So go ahead and unfriend them: it’s a happy act of liberation.

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