by Anthony Schneider
(from Kitchen Table Talk)
I Know You Are But What Am I?
We’ve all seen it happen. A seemingly peaceful online chat turns into a violent row. Or a measured blog post spurs an avalanche of mean, nasty comments. Maybe you know one of the perpetrators: those seemingly nice people who are mean and aggressive online. Maybe you’ve been the object of an angry online post.
We’ve probably all done it, to some extent, said something meaner online than we would say to someone in person, written a crueler review, hurled a worse insult than we’d say face to face, human to human.
Zones of Freeform Hate
There’s a lot of anger and aggression online. British psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, author of All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, believes anger “feels like the defining color and tone of our daily social and political lives.” It’s bad in the real world, and it’s worse online. Cohen views X (and many other social media) as forums of intense anger: “The trolling, shaming and piling on show it as a zone of freeform hate.”
There are countless studies that show we are meaner, nastier, angrier, and more aggressive online than IRL (in real life).
The Netflix documentary “Brainchild” presents a persuasive study where people rate a singer’s performance. Some respondents are told they may have to read their comments aloud to the singer. They don’t give the singer high ratings, but their comments are civil, even kind. A second group is assured their comments will remain anonymous. Not surprisingly, the ones who think they’ll remain anonymous are meaner. When (surprise!) they have to read their feedback to the singer, they are gentler. Two of them say, “I’m sorry.” One says, “You could be really good,” and later admits, “I wanted to be nice.”
So why don’t we? Want to be nice when we’re online?
It’s a perfect storm. We’re angry, the world seems crueler, harsher than it used to. Online, anger manifests as aggression, relatively unheeded and unchecked. What’s worse, this online meanness is confirmed, corroborated, and exacerbated by other angry people as well as bots and the AI behind social media and other online vehicles. AI software whose job it is to make these forums more popular — not more polite. The meek may be blessed, but the angry are the key to “sticky,” popular, profitable social media platforms.
How Did We Get Here?
No one is free from anger, and there’s a lot of it around. Most of us agree with Aristotle that anybody can become angry. Freud believes anger is an instinct, wrapped inside our DNA, and civilization is an attempt to contain our aggressive drives by imposing societal rules. In Freudian terms, then, the online world has fewer rules, fewer constraining elements, like school and family, to keep anger at bay, to manage and maintain peaceful coexistence.
Social media and other online platforms are often anonymous virtual places. No one gets physically harmed online. Which is not to say online words or actions aren’t painful or abusive. Quite the contrary, online bullying has led to physical violence, hate crimes, and suicides. So, the online world isn’t safe, but it’s usually safe for the person saying the mean things. The victims may suffer, but generally no harm comes to the “keyboard warriors” spewing vile and malice.
This is known as the online disinhibition effect. Researchers define it as “the reduction or abandonment of social restrictions and inhibitions found in normal face-to-face communication.” In other words, it’s the tendency for generally nice people to engage in aggressive behavior online. Psychologist John Suler describes another layer as “toxic disinhibition,” the increased tendency towards online flaming and other inappropriate behaviors.
The internet hasn’t been around for long, so this is a fairly recent phenomenon that we’re still trying to figure out. However, there are some theories that explore the reasons this “disinhibition” occurs.
Anger Zones, Biases and Social Trust
We feel more comfortable venting, talking about controversial subjects, or just being mean, online. So, we do it. To be fair, feeling less guarded online can create the opposite effect as well. People can be much kinder on the internet, more compassionate, and more likely to open up about intimate struggles and thoughts.
Online activity is generally instant and often anonymous. We don’t think long and hard about what we’re going to say, as we might in real life, talking to someone we know.
All of this is exacerbated by a bunch of biases. For example, most of us think the world was a kinder, nicer place at some point in the past. It’s an illusion, or psychological bias, but it’s prevalent and persistent. Social psychologist Adam Mastroianni, author of the paper “The Illusion of Moral Decline” conducted a study that shows just about everyone thinks the world became a worse place around 20 years after they were born. (With an added uptick in “bad” according to parents, right around the time their kids were born).
There’s also an increase in disconnection and a corresponding decline of social trust. We’re seeing widespread loneliness and the erosion of community life. Fewer people know their neighbors and more people feel a lack of connection to community organizations. So, we’re just asking for trouble online, Freud would doubtless say, where we can let our anger instinct loose.
Technology Exacerbates
Technology makes it worse. From commerce to conversation, our online lives are shaped by AI, algorithms, and machine learning. Ranking algorithms like the ones that power Facebook and other social media platforms prioritize engagement, and, to that end, show us posts that are controversial. Similarly, affinity analysis shows us products we’ll like or posts that will engage (or enrage) us. These algorithms manipulate online forums and seek not to make things more peaceful (bo-ring) but more volatile (cha-ching). There are bots whose purpose is to incite anger. Bully bots, whose online purpose is to inflame online chatboards, to fuel the fires of nastiness and dissent. (Think bots are not so prevalent? Think again. According to Security magazine, Bots accounted for 47.4% of all internet traffic in 2022.)
What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There – Or Could It?
Yeah, I’m looking at you, tech. You’re like the drunk in the bar, who spurs the guy to take a swing, muttering, “he said something about your mother.” Whether you are specifically designed to do it or not, you bots and AI-based manipulators — you stir shit up, you fuel the aggressors.
But hang on, what about those people who calm other people down? That gentle man or woman in the bar who cools flaring tempers, the person who invites combatants to communicate, talk it out, respect each other? Maybe that’s all of us, the online onlookers, with our rectitude on mute. Maybe we need to get more involved to get discussions back on track — more civil, more kind. Common ground can unite people, and there’s a lot of common ground, isn’t there?
Maybe we all need to act online as if we are in person to find that common ground. Heineken made a series of ads about it, their “Worlds Apart” series, pitting, for example, climate change deniers against environmental activists. The ads ask: Is there more that unites us than divides us? And the answer seems to be: yes. With a few tricks and ground-rules, people in real life, even people on opposite sides of a debate, manage to have civil, often meaningful, conversations.
Guardrails, Guides and Personal Growth
Maybe we need to think first, take a minute, before we spew online. Like Thomas Jefferson who suggests counting to ten (or is it a hundred?) before saying something nasty. A lot of managers and life/business coaches suggest we write that nasty email to our boss, friend, partner, but read it over first, sit on it, leave it in the outbox overnight, or send it to ourselves and read it as if it’s directed at us… before we hit send. Maybe we should do the same thing online. Count to a hundred, call a friend, send the post to yourself to review, or jot it down in a journal first.
Could better AI be a guardrail, or act like that wise couples therapist, keeping people in-line with a benevolent comment, and possibly even warning people they’ll get kicked out (and kicking them out)? Yes, theoretically. Policies and laws can help. For example, both the US and UK have laws designed to keep children safe online, while the EU has introduced rules to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake news. We can make laws to regulate AI — and police the Internet better. Of course, it’s always dicey to implement guardrails retroactively, but it’s a whole lot better than doing nothing. We can be proactive — we can go deeper, build better software. “Friendly AI” builds programs that are compatible with human values. In other words, we train the machines to make us play nice. All of the above may make social media vehicles less “exciting” and potentially less popular. But is that a bad thing?
What if we hunt the bots that fuel the flames of anger – and silence them? What if we go with “Friendly AI” and retrain the systems that manage our online discussions to impose anti-aggression guardrails? Sure, there may be less traffic on that social media site, but the posts will be nicer, less aggressive, more like things people say in real life, maybe even better versions of our raging offline selves. Of course, we’ll have to convince the builders, big tech and social media outfits. For the most part, the companies that build the online arenas where we communicate and vent are built for profit, not peace.
Finally, we can understand, even use, our anger. Treat the cause, not the symptom, by going deeper than online or offline — by going within. Les Carter, psychologist and author of the bestseller The Anger Trap, sees anger as a complex emotion and angry people as “hurting, fragile people” who “wish to preserve personal worth, perceived needs, and heartfelt convictions.” If we understand our anger, Carter preaches, we can make sense of it, approach it constructively, and use it to understand ourselves. Once we do that, we’ll be more in control — and less prone to aggressive outbursts online or offline. Josh Cohen also believes anger can be used for good, but warns it ain’t easy. If anger is to foster love or spur growth, according to Cohen, we need to embrace rather than deny our own vulnerability and self-doubt.
Can we learn not only to live with anger but to use it for some good? Can we make rage usable? Let’s hope so.
All We are Saying…
Give peace a chance. Be nice, be kind, be vulnerable. Beat the biases, retrain the AI, and silence those belligerence bots. And maybe, just maybe, we can dial up dialog and fight the online fires of division and nastiness. Here’s hoping.