How telling people to die became normal - merciless trolling is a fact of online life that may never go away

A friend of mine recently attended an after-work social at a pub. 90% of the people attending would have been forty or older, and several including him were early thirties. There were also two nineteen year-olds that had joined the company about six-months prior to this.

I was absolutely shocked to hear that after getting quite drunk and letting their hair down a bit, they started harassing a few other members of staff by telling them that they were overpaid for how easy their jobs were and that it's ridiculous they aren't making the same money.

It was initially taken as young men not knowing what's acceptable or not, but after it continued for a while it ended up with quite a few people getting upset. My friend took one of them aside and told him how inappropriate the behaviour was and that he should not drink so much if this is the result. He took it pretty well and calmed down a bit.

Later, the same young colleague was mocking another in a bit of back and forth banter (totally acceptable), but a lot of his humour was just lost on the older crowd which I think frustrated him. My friend asked him something like "how much did you pay to get your haircut like that?", which was humour appropriate to the current conversation, but he absolutely shocked the table when he turned around for his witty retort and asked "when was the last time you thought about killing yourself?".

When I was told about this, I as absolutely shocked. Never before have I heard of someone who was put together enough to get themselves a decent job in a corporate setting, but didn't have the presence of mind to know that something like that was far, far beyond acceptable.

I don't know if that's something related to the humour of his generation or just something off about this particular person - possibly a little of both by the sound of it.

Somewhat related but online halo 3 and call of duty 4 were absolutely brutal for things like KYS, R words, the N word, racism by children, t-bagging moms and mums. 16yr old me was entirely numb to it.
People will say literally anything over a headset, that they would never say in real life.

While we all did occasionally say some pretty horrid things, I had a nice group who would also sing along to Katy Perry while shooting each other.

I think the worst online place now is probably the VR apps that have been overrun by kids.

Regarding COVIDIOTS in particular I feel there's a level of disdain from the "internet natives" towards those who basically just use facebook.
Which is why we see people dunking on boomers and conservatives, and American Christians.

I'm still jokingly upset, the internet was for us. MySpace was for us.

Then facebook normalised social media for the "non internet natives" and generally people have been escaping from platform to platform ever since.

Once it was to escape parents joining facebook, now it's to escape enshittification.

The idea that a cultural behavior can become an immutable "fact of life" is a fallacy. It's a notion that serves as propaganda for the continued tolerance of those repugnant ideas and beliefs.

You cannot stop everyone everywhere from casually telling others to kill themselves, you absolutely can moderate and structure communities to put an end to it.

The underlying conclusion of the "it's a fact of life" belief is that, like Mondays, there's no point in pushing back or trying to change things. But things can change, culture can change, behaviors that were once broadly acceptable can become socially unacceptable even on the Internet. Whether it's on a covid subreddit or Kiwi Farms. Even if we can't achieve 100% success, 90% is still worth pursuing.

Regarding the topic, I really feel like the conversation conveniently skirts around how absolutely broken society is in general. It goes to ask the question "why are people so ok saying cruel things online to each other," then completely dodges the contextual environment these comments are made in.

Covid-19 was awful, and the United States had awful, incompetent leadership through all of 2020. It's easy to have forgotten how bad some Trump's response was 3 years later, but recall at one point Trump literally espoused injecting bleach, and additionally supported horse dewormer as an alternative to vaccines. [See Comment Reply Below] A contingent of his supporters were already in the anti-vaxx camp prepandemic. So, you have a virulent plague going around, the economy is in shambles, people are forced to stay inside, some people get generous unemployment, while some people are forced to work the front line and expose themselves.

Additionally, the vitriol espoused by some of the recipients of Herman Cain prior to their deaths was something to behold. Did all of them? Nah, but it's still a factional thing to attribute the worst qualities of a movement to any adherents. It's only human,

Why should an online person, under those circumstances, be expected to act with decorum and kindness to others around them? The social contract has broken down, their target helped elect a man who is ignoring a global pandemic, they might be locked in their apartment alone, they might have lost their job, they themselves might have lost loved ones, or be worried about getting sick and dying from this very disease. Do we seriously expect that a person in those circumstances owes decorum and kindness?

Also, we're on the internet, a space that essentially spent 1995-2016 creating hateful spaces as a buy-in feature. It astounds me that even in 2023, people neglect to remember this. Additionally, there's literally no consequences for any of this. Internet anonymity is quite ironclad. Oh, and in facebook's metrics, if an individual spends more time engaging with a post that says "kys" instead of family photos, facebook is designed to direct the user at the more engaging content. It's a feature, not a bug.

Finally, I like to think that the people who post these comments once started as people who just posted normally and kindly at one point. It's not like the first post someone makes online is "kys." No, people become this way due to external pressures changing them this way.

I suppose someone could make a comment saying that there's a difference between acting maliciously and posting an exceptionally cruel comment, verses just.... not. I think that misses the point. We were sold products that allowed us to communicate with anyone in the world, guilt free. The government essentially abandoned us in a global catastrophe, and the media has not caught up with the fact that the social contract is basically shreds at this point. Hoping for people to be nicer to others online won't change anything. We already live in hell.

At no point in this article does the author even think about this, but it's about what I've come to expect from the Atlantic. I really think the Atlantic has gone down in quality since it's recent acquisition by Laurene Powell Jobs. They essentially continuously put out soft liberal "think pieces" at this point. I think I saw an article with this same topic bemoaning r/hermancainaward in mid 2021.

Many users posted under their real, full name, next to a picture of their face, complicating the easy narrative that the anonymity of the internet is what makes such behavior possible.

Yep, not that shocking. Also unsurprising would be the revelation that so many of the initial users to post online without using aliases were of demographics which rarely experienced repercussions for their horrible offline behavior, as well. Why would so many of them — at least, before the terrible-no-good menace of cancel culture comes along — bother to hide themselves from the recipients of their words? After all, the people they targeted and harassed were (to their perspective) socially lesser than them in some way.

And even after being called out, it wouldn’t matter — a good portion of them had already found and fitted themselves into their preferred, like-minded offline communities through online connections, resulting in them only doubling down on their beliefs that their behaviors were absolutely justified.

”You can’t really sustain that level of frustration and angst and anxiety and maintain a healthy spirit,” he said. “A better therapy is to just not be on social media at all.”

Vehemently agree. Social media breeds frustration if not consistently, actively, and carefully cultivated to filter out those elements which disrupt one’s personal equilibrium; time management especially is key.

Actually… bit of a tangent here, but one of the primary factors contributing to my decision to cut out reddit (my only ‘big-time’ social media) has to do with the tl;dr aspect. People would go apeshit in the comments of even the most well-written posts if they went over some arbitrarily predetermined allotted length without a summary sentence/paragraph.

Hand-fed, it needed to be. Consume, consume, consume — but to what end? Why does everything, including what we do as a leisure activity, need to be faster, easier; borderline stupid? So much so that we become collectively enraged at random strangers on the internet, who have simply written out into the void for their own enjoyment or release or whatever personal purpose, as if personally insulted that they did not cater to our individual browsing preferences. What in the world is that? These people don’t owe these other people anything; it would be so easy to just… ignore whatever it is that does not appeal to one’s tastes. Instead, so many people choose to troll; to literally waste their time harassing and berating random strangers over something that is, essentially, nothing.

Is it just me that does not remember this from their earlier online interactions? Back when everything was less sleek and conglomerated, more scattered and haphazard; homemade.

I used to enjoy losing so many hours meandering through the weird little thoughts of others; sifting through their interests and idiosyncrasies. I still do, but it’s as if there is a larger force purposely trying to push such creators out. The long-winded ones.

We are all losing patience. Moreover, we seem to be actively campaigning for the overall destruction of the concept of patience, itself. I would say trolling is both partially a symptom and a cause of this process.

Edited distracting typo.

There's an old "saying" you might be familiar with, and I'm going to use the crude version: 'Talk shit, get hit'. In other words, when you open your mouth to say something mean or dumb, there used to be a VERY high chance you'd experience some form of physical backlash: the gentlest would be people suddenly giving you the cold shoulder and basically being socially ostracized; the more extreme form would actually be getting physically hit.

Then people found that if you said these same things but had no consequences... this is where I would love to know what psychologists have found, because there's clearly something within people that shows when you can get away with doing Bad Shit, you're going to do it because there's no reason NOT to do it. Or in other words: with the anonymity granted by the Internet, there's definitely been a rise in people being assholes to each other. And as the Internet has become more prevalent- arguably a necessity today- more people have taken advantage of this to be rude to others in general... because there are often no consequences to being an ass online (assuming, of course, that you actually ARE using the power of being anonymous online).