Five years after the coronavirus outbreak, many Americans say public behavior in the United States has changed for the worse, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
Five years after the coronavirus outbreak, many Americans say public behavior in the United States has changed for the worse, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
Disagree. I say since the progression of the internet and how it became more accessible, was the day everyone has gotten ruder.
As I always said, give a person a computer, internet access and tell them the anonymity you’ll have online. Watch them flip their character around as they turn into absolute assholes to people online.
The problem is that this theory is incomplete. What actually makes them become a total asshat on the internet is no real social consequences for being so. Being banned isn’t actually a deep social consequence. Especially when you can just use a VPN and spin up a new email, and then a new account, basically infinitely. So while the initial point of anonymity is part of it, the deeper part of it is lack of real social consequences for such behavior, enabling shitty behavior long-term.
The passing of cyberbullying laws only helped, but not really to the effect lawmakers probably had hoped it would. The real story of the matter is how utterly out of tune tons of politicians are to everything that happens in the internet, aside from wanting to take it over for the sake of capitalism and surveillance. All the while letting Big Tech do whatever it wants because they’re the ones who understand the internet far better than a politician could.
And even that not factoring into it, a lot of moderators and admins have trouble finding the middle ground. They are either too lenient or too strict, almost no in-between. Being a moderator is basically a virtual janitor that does not pay anything and being an admin is where you could be paying for something but getting no return. There’s no room in either position for them to properly evaluate things.