I've got some friends with whom I disagree politically and we even regularly debate. In fact for one friend, our friendship has been maintained over the long te

I've got some friends with whom I disagree politically and we even regularly debate. In fact for one friend, our friendship has been maintained over the long term by regularly meeting for dinner and drinks, and often we end up having massive arguments about all kinds of topics. Our secret is that we don't let it reduce our respect for one another, at the end of the evening we're always shaking hands and agreeing to meet again next week. It may also help that when we became friends we worked together, so we forged a bond of mutual respect through our work. I have another friend who is a real SJW snowflake type (he got hired by Google, perhaps that explains it, he wasn't like that before). With him I don't tend to debate politics much because he gets genuinely upset. But we've also always come back and been friends again afterwards, and I've noticed he's sometimes gone off and researched whatever I was saying for himself and has questions. So obviously parts of it sunk in. I think Facebook can be difficult because your default mental state is that all those people are "friends" even if maybe you haven't seen them for a while, or if your friendships have very different depths. The term friend is very black and white. Most people only have a tiny number of really deep friendships, often only one or two at most, I mean of the sort built on real long term knowledge of each other and which can survive genuine disagreement over divisive issues. You say "a fair number of my friends" which sounds like many of them probably aren't deep friends. They're probably more like friendships that were once deep, or who were party buddies, or who were former colleagues that you got along with etc. For them you'd probably be surprised to discover that if you started hanging out with them regularly for some reason, they'd get over it and you'd be OK.