I think this is just an extension of the Eternal September. The population of the Internet is wildly different from those that you're thinking of: not only is

I think this is just an extension of the Eternal September. The population of the Internet is wildly different from those that you're thinking of: not only is a majority of the world now online, a vanishing minority of the countries many of us are primarily exposed to are not. There are plenty of reasons that this new population may establish different norms than the old one: Some say it's because they're privileged, and don't understand the harm that Enlightenment liberalism does to the marginalized. Some say it's because they were free-thinkers and iconoclasts, and indeed, you'd expect any heavily-selected subpopulation to be less conformist than "all people". Others have claimed it's simply intelligence: back when the Internet was all educated nerds, support for free speech was higher because of the well-known correlation between intelligence and free speech absolutism[1]. In addition to the Eternal September effect, I think the broader retrenchment of liberalism we see across the world is very relevant. The cause/effect relationship between the Internet and this cultural retrenchment is unclear but IMO, almost certainly bidirectional. My model of liberalism has always been that its support in large populations is a fragile state, and that it's only supported by the masses when they've cargo-culted it from their civic religion. The minute this effect fades, most people don't have the moral reasoning ability to actually hold a principle, and can't be convinced that protection of an enemy under a principle is a protection of that principle, not of the enemy. They also don't appear to have the capacity to understand that the world turns, and the person on top is guaranteed to be someone they dislike, at one point or another. The only skew that rolling back Enlightenment protections is likely to have over time is against the _marginalized_. [1] Note that this isn't a stand-in for "free speech is good", since the proponents of the privilege argument would claim that measures of intelligence are themselves just measuring privilege.