Why Online Comments Are So Toxic

[mia]

Online anonymity creates a sense of a culture without consequences.
July 31, 2012

In the year that I wrote for a blog about Brooklyn real estate, I was regularly plagued by "trolls" -- online commenters who write inflammatory or derisive things in public forums, hoping to provoke an emotional response. These commenters called me, and one another, everything from stupid to racist, or sometimes stupid racists. And that was just when I posted the menu of a new café.

The most infamous and offensive of these commenters was a man (we assumed) who called himself "The What." His remarks ranged from insults to threats. "I know where you live and I'm coming for you and your family," he once wrote. The intrigue around The What's identity warranted a cover story in New York magazine. What kind of person would spend so much time, and so much energy, engaging in virtual hate?

The consensus among sociologists and psychologists who study online behavior is that all kinds of people can become trolls -- not just the unwound, the immature or the irate. See your perfectly pleasant work neighbor, furiously typing next to you? He might be trolling an Internet site right now....

One Web site breaks trolls into categories: the hater, the moral crusader, the debunker, the defender. But trolls might not retain those qualities in real life. It's just that the Internet's anonymity makes it impossible for them to resist spewing vitriol from the protective cave of cyberspace. Psychologists call it the "disinhibition effect," in which "the frequency of self-interested unethical behavior increases among anonymous people." Non-academics refer to it as "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory": the combination of anonymity and an audience brings out the absolute worst in people....

http://www.alternet.org/media/why-online-comments-are-so-toxic?page=0%2C1&paging=off

[bemildred]

1. People are assholes in the real world too, but they have to be more careful.

On the internet, there are no consequences to being an asshole, so the masks come off.

[liberal N proud]

2. If you are an asshole here on DU, your anonymous ass can get tombstoned

But that only bans you from posting here, it doesn't stop you from being an asshole.

Of course this is all a hypothetical and you is not you bemildred, it is anyone who posts here.

[bemildred]

4. I'm just saying it's no surprise.

People would be just the same out in public if there were no consequences. What is strange on the internet is you have a social context with few and very limited social consequences. The new DU is an interesting experiment to see if such societies can be self-regulating.

[liberal N proud]

5. Yep

[doohnibor]

3. Until they make terminals that splash....

In person, assholes get a face full of the nearest beverage. Online, there is no social comeuppance.