National UnFriend Day: the day to eliminate useless friends on Facebook and reflect on digital relationships

If Monday is traditionally the day of new beginnings, of the start of good intentions, today you can add one: from Monday onwards, I am doing the "cleaning" amongmy Facebook friends. Yes, because today, 17 November, America celebrates National UnFriend Day, the national day of deletion of annoying (or semi-stranger) friends from Facebook.

The movement against 'useless' contacts or contacts that we no longer want in our lives was launched in 2010 by American hostJimmy Kimmel during his show on the broadcaster Abc. "I see people who say they have thousands of friends, it's impossible," says the presenter in the video in which he launches the idea of Unfollow day, and adds: "If you really want to know who is your friend, write on Facebook that you have to move house at the weekend and need help. The ones who will reply are your friends, the others are not'.

That idea thus became UnFriend Day and a few American bloggers lined up some criteria set by Kimmel to decide who to eliminate: friends who post too much, those who don't know how to use grammar properly, those who post too often about the weather, their children, politics or their workouts.

Raise your hand if you have ever, at least once, scrolled through your Feb timeline and exclaimed "who is this guy?" when you came across the post of someone among your contacts. Maybe they are people we befriended on Facebook many years ago, when the social network - borrowing from the initial idea of its founder Mark Zuckerberg to create a social network for Harvard students - was practically only used to track down former classmates (remember?) and organise bitter-sweet (sometimes more bitter than sweet, let's confess) reunion dinners. Or they are mere acquaintances, perhaps never met in person, with whom there has been virtually no interaction. Well, today is the day to clean up and get rid of all those friends who no longer interest us, without remorse or regret.

This decluttering day is celebrated online, so we too can take inspiration from the American idea, as they already do in the UK, but also in New Zealand, for example. We can take the opportunity not only to get rid of friends, or supposed friends, but also to reflect on the quality of our relationships, on the relationship we have with social media, with feeling overwhelmed by the magnum sea of notifications that now mark every moment of our day lived with an eye on the smartphone. And maybe take a digital detox day. Of course, if Jimmy Kimmel were to launch the idea of Unfriend Day today, he would probably also refer to Instagram and Tiktok and not just Facebook, which when it debuted - in 2004 in America, then in 2008 in Italy - was one of the very few existing social networks, a true novelty in the way of communicating online.