"I’ll still keep up an online presence, particularly on Twitter.... I find it calmer than Facebook."

Writes Kenneth Burns, the erstwhile Isthmus writer (who's moved to Tennessee). He's deactivating Facebook at least for the summer.

Mainly, I’m weary of the politics. Understand, I’m fascinated by electoral politics, like any journalist. I have my views, and I express them in the polling booth and not many other places. Not on Facebook. I’m not interested in politics as an all-consuming leisure activity.

In my experience, though, Facebook is one rabidly political social network, and it’s not political in inspiring ways. It’s political in reductive, repetitive ways.

But why has his Facebook experience been so rabid and uncalm compared to Twitter? He's got himself to blame:

[M]ost of the political memes on my feed happen to be posted by people I don’t know. As a public figure, I regularly get friend requests from strangers, and I accept them.

Why did you accept them? I don't do that. Facebook is a way to see stuff from your family and friends and to find old friends from high school and college. But it won't work like that if you accept 1,000 requests from strangers! In Twitter, you have your followers, but you don't have to follow them. That's the difference. Even when you are following people in Twitter, their posts just flow by unread unless you look. I drop by Twitter now and then and read a few posts from random tweeters among the 121 that I follow. And as for the 4,765 who are following me, I haven't given them anything in over a month.