Yes, it’s a huge can of worms, and I’m sure I don’t have sufficient answers to any of it, but I spent a few minutes thinking about this, probably I will find I disagree with myself in the future, maybe I disagree with myself in the present, but here’s a crack at it. Sorry if this is wordy, it’d be much shorter if I had more time.
I think I really had BB more in mind than the internet at large. Each site has its own space or spaces with different groups with different shared boundaries. Most general interest forums for interests that are broad explicitly call out a lot of topics as forbidden since everyone will drop into a scream fest if religion, politics, etc. come up. You can’t go to a Disney forum, explain why Trump’s behavior and policies meet the formal definition of fascism and not get banned, and that’s really not a bad thing. Even the hedgehog forum I frequent has rules about proscribed topics. You’d think hedgehog owners would be inherently thoughtful, kind-hearted, polite people unlikely to get into bitter prolonged arguments, but no.
So yeah, if I hop over to Breitbart and look at the comments it’s offense central for me. So I don’t go to Breitbart. If I said anything it’d be totally offensive, piss off everyone, and trigger a flame war. I’d be a trolley, and since I’m morally opposed to others driving trollies, I’m not going to do it. I think some of what you’re complaining about are people seeking out conflict, and I’d agree that those people have behavioral problems, even if we’d frame some patterns behind the behavior differently.
The internet does create a messy heap of social conflict as a side effect of the design. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are vast disparate spaces where there’s little defining any group besides breathing, and they’re the front lines of endless rage as people with conflicting values and views bump into each other and handle those conflicts like bickering children. FB has some firewalls to control this. Reddit and Twitter are broken because they have no way to segment people who will create a volatile mix, so driving trollies is extra rampant.
If I’m in a very public space I try to be conscientious. My political things on FB are limited to friends, and on Twitter I talk about hedgehogs. A lot. And I avoid comments on news site articles since there will be bickering people, which is a side effect of the internet. There are few limits to keep people who will fight in their separate corners. There’s no fixing it. But I don’t really blame people too much for being human, holding values/boundaries, and responding when they’re tromped over. They’re being put in a weird unnatural environment that in some ways isn’t really all that humane, and I mostly worry about keeping myself in line since that’s all I have much control over or responsibility for.
People who choose to go to spaces where there are people that hold different values and rile things up are trollies, and they deserve to be smacked down hard.
Because the internet exists and is a vast social conflict zone, there are a few values that do need to be more widely adopted. There are both women and men, so misogynist bullshit has to be dealt with. So too with racism, antisemitism, and other xenophobic bullshit. Working to root out language that is rooted in misogyny, racism, etc. makes sense, since while it might be normal for some, it’s a problem when your communication in inherently insulting, and that language defines the models with which you frame your understanding. If your term for greedy is “Jew,” that language internalizes prejudice, and there are a lot of terms that carry misogynist/racist baggage. How one goes about dealing with that is the hard part. I’m fairly certain we humans need to sort out as many ways to teach and cultivate empathy as we can. I’m pretty sure that instant angry confrontations, instant ostracisms, and angry mobs won’t work for helping transmit values or get people to internalize empathy for others, but the problem is with the relative effectiveness of approaches, not the goal. And since there are people whose identity is tied to hatred of others, at some point stronger responses are probably merited. Xenophobia and the internet do not mix, taking steps to try to deal with that and open people’s eyes to the reality of our shared humanity are needed, and with that dealing with behaviors and communication patterns that are rooted in old xenophobic bullshit are justified. We as a society and as a population need to work on developing and promoting values to deal with our increasing interconnection.
