Yeah, it was the perfect storm at the right time!
I’m old enough to start using the web at college, mostly for Usenet and mIrc chats. I remember the first social networks, Friendster, Multiply, MySpace, Tribe.net etc. Computers were expensive and Internet wasn’t so popular. So there were a few privileged souls that could afford it and most of us understood that English was the lingua franca of Web and were integrated into the groups, learned the rules etc.
Then came the popularization and ubiquity of computers and smartphones and a crowd with varying degrees of comprehension of how things work, gearing from localization or international use to issues of text comprehension. The lack of education of the people having access to the web wasn’t the problem, the volume and velocity prevented assimilation. Thus shenanigans abound.
Kids think that English is some kind of pretend language that the characters talk on YouTube and just when they learn it at school as second language they understand that other people have other mother tongues. What they think is that if they learn English as second language, all English speaking people learn Portuguese as second language, They know how to speak it, they’re just being lazy. Some people carry this to adulthood.
It’s similar to the “talk English!” issue you have. They believe you should speak Portuguese, dammit.
