7 ms·

The Psychology of Online Political Hostility

86 points by IAmEveryone 5y ago

francoisdevlin 5y ago
I think the fine doctors over at penny arcade documented this earlier.... https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I’m very confused, because the abstract actually says the complete opposite. It states that fuckwads online also tend to be fuckwads offline!
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Seeing some people whom I knew well offline first and now interact with mostly online (typically schoolmates), it seems like their offline acidity is around lemon juice and their online acidity is 6 to 12 molar HCl. It’s simultaneously correct to describe them as being “more acidic” online, but practically, the penny arcade cartoon seems to fit better.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      I understand what the general argument is. I’m saying it’s incongruous with the actual study presented here, which posits that people who are acidic online are also similarly acidic offline in political discourse. (It seems unintuitive to me, because I have similar experiences to you! But I’m wondering if my resistance personally to the concept is due to bias…)
- chooseaname 5y ago
  Politicians don't have anonymity and yet we see plenty of fuckwad politicians.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    I've heard that as an explanation for why we have so many fuckwad politicians. Only the most shameless will tend to volunteer themselves for such a hostile career path. Normal people don't want it.
- fragmede 5y ago
  This seemed true back in 2004 when it was originally posted, but since then Facebook and YouTube have both pursued real name policies (at one point or other) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. Eg Anti-vaxxers have little qualms on having their names attached to their opinions. If online discourse is to evolve, merely linking to an irrelevant post from 16 years ago, being presented as gospel, would make for a good case study on why it hasn't evolved.
- jameal 5y ago
  The study is looking specifically at hostility in the context of political discussions, not just general internet misbehavior. In any case, The Penny Arcade comic seems to depict the mismatch hypothesis which the study found little evidence to support: > Overall, however, we found little evidence that mismatch-induced processes underlie the hostility gap. We found that people are not more hostile online than offline; ... And while they're not ruling out the mismatch hypothesis entirely, they do offer an alternative which they call the connectivity hypothesis: > ...Thus, our findings suggest that the feeling that online interactions are much more hostile than offline interactions emerges because hostile individuals–especially those high in status-driven risk taking –have a significantly larger reach online; they can more easily identify targets and their behavior is more broadly visible.
- alexashka 5y ago
  They have it backwards. Most people are fuckwads that have to pretend they are human beings out in public due to culture. Anonymity removes that pressure.
pessimizer 5y ago
> [...]hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible than offline. Not only more visible, but more out of context. The identical political conversation between someone and their parent, for example, in the context of a loving family relationship, will be remembered differently than that discussion with a faceless online swarm. You're forced to think of your parent as a person, whereas anonymous opposition is easy to dehumanize. And if you're a middle-class PMC, you can just fall into thinking of the internet as a mob of subhuman lumpen morons out for bloodsport and seeing every interaction in which people vehemently disagree with you as further evidence of that. ---- Edit: The fixation on online culture as the source of strife from people annoys me. I know plenty of mean, aggressive people in real life. I know very few on the internet - because I know fewer people online than I do in real life. Seeing people you don't know be mean online and thinking that online life is meaner is like watching the local news and concluding that everyone but you, your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers are murderers.
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  The question is if the ability of the hateful to find communities of like-unminded people allows them to persist, organize, and affect the lives of the objects of their hatred in ways that were less likely than before. I’m not sure what the answer is, tbh. I certainly doubt something like the Trump presidency would have been -possible, or as likely, before the internet. Organizations from ISIS to “proud boys” certainly profit from the ability to proselytize on YouTube. But, at the same time, the general trend of the arc of history bending towards justice appears to be still alive, to some degree.
  - jcims 5y ago
    >... hateful ... like-unminded ... Do you see these folks you're talking about as fully human? I see this kind of classification a lot, as though 'they' are just a swarm of zombie NPCs following some simplistic algorithm.
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
1962 study: Subjects divided in two groups, both angered. The study cohort believed their frustrater had been harmed and experiences less emotional tension than the control group. Of note, the group who enjoyed hostility catharsis did not become friendlier. I don't think it's a shocking observation political hostility on all sides is often a strategy for self-care in the form of hostility catharsis. Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts. Every one of those interventions are proven to work in many cases, do no harm, allow the free flow of ideas and where effective open doors for bridge building. Yeah, seems hokey... until you actually try these strategies and discover they provide tremendous relief. Study abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05053-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05053-001
- slumdev 5y ago
  > they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship Telling someone their beliefs aren't valid is rude if they're preaching something like flat earth or "law of attraction" or Lysenkoism, but it's not the end of the world. However, telling someone their beliefs aren't valid when those beliefs are merely unpopular or inconvenient reduces the credibility of the "fact checker" and increases the hostility and insularism of the person with these beliefs. In early 2020, the fact checkers told us that anything less than an N95 mask doesn't work. The fact checkers of today tell us that any face mask prevents the transmission of the virus, and they've even come up with words like "anti-masker" to dehumanize people who question them or who merely adhere to their early 2020 statements. In mid-2020, the fact checkers told us that the lab leak theory was preposterous, and promoting it was a Facebook/Twitter excommunicable offense. Today, this idea is mainstream. In early 2021, the fact checkers told us that the vaccine stops the spread of the virus. In mid-2021, the fact checkers told us that the vaccine reduces symptom severity. Today, mainstream fact checkers are recognizing that vaccine immunity wanes and is ineffective against new variants. Fact checkers seem to be wrong more often than they're right. So why does the fact checker get to decide what I can post on Facebook and Twitter?
steve76 5y ago
So this is version 1 of the research. It reads to me like they are covering for social media. No regulations please: >In sum, these analyses suggest that people do not engage in online political hostility by accident. Online political hostility reflects deliberate intentions to be hostile, formed by individuals who are hostile whether they engage with others online or offline and who seek out the possibility of being hostile in both online and offline contexts. In the large discussion networks formed online, people are much more likely to observe the actions of such individuals, whereas their actions are more private in offline settings. One potential implication of this argument is that the online contexts have provided people with a more accurate – and not more biased – understanding of just how contentious political topics are for some. And this is the latest version, version 4. It reads like they want a professional class of trained social media moderators: >These results imply that policies against hostility should seek to reduce the connectivity of hostile individuals, for example,by decreasing the visibility of the content they produce or increasing the possibility of enforcing legal actions against illegal behavior(Haidt and Rose-Stockwell 2019). Of course, these policies need to be finely balanced in order to not curtail the freedom of expression. >Furthermore, our findings show that norms of civility are somewhat weaker online than offline, and continued exposure to hostile messages may increase this gap, potentially propelling more hostility through a vicious cycle(Brady et al. 2021). >Consequently, our research is consistent with prior findings that interventions strengthening norms or highlighting norm-violations can reduce hostility(Matias 2019; Siegel and Badaan 2020). At the same time, it is relevant to highlight the danger in encouraging users to set and to police norms of civility, as this may ignite novel forms of hostility about appropriateness and could undermine goals of improving the general tone of online discussions. From this perspective, public discourse should inform the setting of norms, but third-party referees –such as platform policies or trained moderators–would be mainly responsible for promoting and enforcing them in specific discussion networks. Are you allowed to do that? Same exact results, but completely different outcome and instructions on what to do next.
motohagiography 5y ago
How is the "hostility gap" in the paper not just what happens when you remove physical consequences from these people and people like them? The authors appear to do some free association with status seeking and threatening others as well, and I'd wonder whether there is a clearer way to present the ideas. Having met and known trolls personally in real life growing up online and working for ISPs in the 90s, to me they fell into a few categories. The most obvious one was the assorted personality disorders that were just really damaged goods. It was a blessing to the world they found the internet instead of preying on people in real life, which surely at least a few did. The ostensibly sane ones were a kind of henchmen to bullies who lacked the physicality and charisma of the bully they followed and instead could reify their cruelty and revenge fantasies online and get off on the attention. The final group was nihilistic political operators, who got into politics because having an opposition team is an outlet for an urge to be a piece of shit to others, and it's a kind of sport to them. You see them disrupting and derailing conversations with talking points, arbitrary racism and hostility to keep thoughtful people away from a controversial topic, and low effort comments. They worked up from activist groups to political party "rat f-er" operatives, and in a more successful life they might have been spies, prosecutors, or jail guards. From what I can tell about the trolls I met, I think they are trying to become something more contemptible than they already feel they are, as a way to reclaim their own shame and self-hatred by rebasing their identity on something can they control, instead of self-identifying by the life event that made them feel ashamed. There's nothing you could say that will make them feel worse than they already feel about themselves, and unless you are capable of delivering a level of psychological harm that is competitive to their personal peak negative experience, and only with internet arguments, anything you say just makes them feel stronger. This is how they thrive on the negativity. You just can't get drawn in. In terms of how this effects online discussion? I'd be concerned the paper has a bunch of policy prescriptions buried somewhere in it, and the solutions aren't in the domain of policy. It may be as simple as judiciously booting accounts that don't meet a bar instead of legalistic lowest common denominator rules for trolls to litigate against, and teaching young people that cruelty is an expression of need.
- cptnapalm 5y ago
  Your comment about the removal of physical consequences reminded me of this quote from Robert E. Howard: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
dukeofdoom 5y ago
People spouting things online, would never say them in real life, for fear of getting punched in the face. Its interesting to me that the threat of violence is a useful deterrent in civilized society. Its almost like a paradox. That some underlying threat of violence is what causes us to respect each other in real life to some degree. Perhaps a keyboard that zaps stupid social media users fingers would be a useful deterrent. If it hasn't been invented yet, I'm claiming patent.
- watwut 5y ago
  Or maybe, the premise is wrong. If fact, those assholes in real life would not be punched into face. They would be cut off and avoided.
exo-pla-net 5y ago
If you scroll down, you can download the pdf to make it more readable on mobile.
dang 5y ago
Recent and related, though the headline is terrible: Online Trolls Just Assholes All the Time, Study Finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334551 - Aug 2021 (27 comments)
noduerme 5y ago
I don't know if anyone else felt this, but I've experienced a real sense of calm and relief in the past couple days since reading an analysis of this paper. I'm not on social media (except Nextdoor - ugh), but sometimes I find it hard to not challenge people who say really noxious things in online comments. I was brought up in a family of legal scholars who approach political and interpersonal debate with facts, proofs, and Socratic reasoning. And so I fall into arguing with online trolls who seem to sense that they can get me worked up just by their sheer unwillingness to engage in civil, reasonable conversation. My takeaway from this paper was that it's not the online environment causing otherwise-normal people to act as trolls. It's that online trolls drown out more reasonable voices, and that they're not nice people in real life. They meet the definition of psychopaths. They are not people who can be swayed by logic or nuance IRL any more than they could be online. They're likely not even interested in whatever falsehoods they're spouting other than trying to get satisfaction by pushing people's buttons. In other words, if you ran into them at a bar, you wouldn't have a conversation with them. You wouldn't even go to the places they go. You wouldn't have them over to dinner and try to have a civil discussion. They are too busy at home beating their wives or whatever it is psychotic people do when they're not trolling online. And this gave me a sense of relief, because now I feel I can ignore them better. I can think of them as people like my SO's abusive father, or my abusive half-brother. People you just don't speak to and don't engage because you won't give them the satisfaction. I know "don't feed the trolls" is nothing new, per se, but somehow it's something I've been good at IRL and bad at online for most of my life. Because online I give people the benefit of the doubt that they're more than what they appear to be at first blush. This essentially proves that they are one-to-one the same people you wouldn't have anything to do with in real life, and for me that's a powerful reason to just walk away and ignore them.
MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
Abstract: Politics on the internet doesn't make people assholes. Instead, assholes are drawn to, and conspicuously visible in, politics on the internet. That's an encouraging thought.

86 points by IAmEveryone 5y ago

I think the fine doctors over at penny arcade documented this earlier.... https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
I’m very confused, because the abstract actually says the complete opposite. It states that fuckwads online also tend to be fuckwads offline!
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Seeing some people whom I knew well offline first and now interact with mostly online (typically schoolmates), it seems like their offline acidity is around lemon juice and their online acidity is 6 to 12 molar HCl. It’s simultaneously correct to describe them as being “more acidic” online, but practically, the penny arcade cartoon seems to fit better.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    I understand what the general argument is. I’m saying it’s incongruous with the actual study presented here, which posits that people who are acidic online are also similarly acidic offline in political discourse. (It seems unintuitive to me, because I have similar experiences to you! But I’m wondering if my resistance personally to the concept is due to bias…)
chooseaname 5y ago
Politicians don't have anonymity and yet we see plenty of fuckwad politicians.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  I've heard that as an explanation for why we have so many fuckwad politicians. Only the most shameless will tend to volunteer themselves for such a hostile career path. Normal people don't want it.
fragmede 5y ago
This seemed true back in 2004 when it was originally posted, but since then Facebook and YouTube have both pursued real name policies (at one point or other) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. Eg Anti-vaxxers have little qualms on having their names attached to their opinions. If online discourse is to evolve, merely linking to an irrelevant post from 16 years ago, being presented as gospel, would make for a good case study on why it hasn't evolved.
jameal 5y ago
The study is looking specifically at hostility in the context of political discussions, not just general internet misbehavior. In any case, The Penny Arcade comic seems to depict the mismatch hypothesis which the study found little evidence to support: > Overall, however, we found little evidence that mismatch-induced processes underlie the hostility gap. We found that people are not more hostile online than offline; ... And while they're not ruling out the mismatch hypothesis entirely, they do offer an alternative which they call the connectivity hypothesis: > ...Thus, our findings suggest that the feeling that online interactions are much more hostile than offline interactions emerges because hostile individuals–especially those high in status-driven risk taking –have a significantly larger reach online; they can more easily identify targets and their behavior is more broadly visible.
alexashka 5y ago
They have it backwards. Most people are fuckwads that have to pretend they are human beings out in public due to culture. Anonymity removes that pressure.

pessimizer 5y ago

> [...]hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible than offline. Not only more visible, but more out of context. The identical political conversation between someone and their parent, for example, in the context of a loving family relationship, will be remembered differently than that discussion with a faceless online swarm. You're forced to think of your parent as a person, whereas anonymous opposition is easy to dehumanize. And if you're a middle-class PMC, you can just fall into thinking of the internet as a mob of subhuman lumpen morons out for bloodsport and seeing every interaction in which people vehemently disagree with you as further evidence of that. ---- Edit: The fixation on online culture as the source of strife from people annoys me. I know plenty of mean, aggressive people in real life. I know very few on the internet - because I know fewer people online than I do in real life. Seeing people you don't know be mean online and thinking that online life is meaner is like watching the local news and concluding that everyone but you, your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers are murderers.

IAmEveryone 5y ago
The question is if the ability of the hateful to find communities of like-unminded people allows them to persist, organize, and affect the lives of the objects of their hatred in ways that were less likely than before. I’m not sure what the answer is, tbh. I certainly doubt something like the Trump presidency would have been -possible, or as likely, before the internet. Organizations from ISIS to “proud boys” certainly profit from the ability to proselytize on YouTube. But, at the same time, the general trend of the arc of history bending towards justice appears to be still alive, to some degree.
- jcims 5y ago
  >... hateful ... like-unminded ... Do you see these folks you're talking about as fully human? I see this kind of classification a lot, as though 'they' are just a swarm of zombie NPCs following some simplistic algorithm.

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago

1962 study: Subjects divided in two groups, both angered. The study cohort believed their frustrater had been harmed and experiences less emotional tension than the control group. Of note, the group who enjoyed hostility catharsis did not become friendlier. I don't think it's a shocking observation political hostility on all sides is often a strategy for self-care in the form of hostility catharsis. Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts. Every one of those interventions are proven to work in many cases, do no harm, allow the free flow of ideas and where effective open doors for bridge building. Yeah, seems hokey... until you actually try these strategies and discover they provide tremendous relief. Study abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05053-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05053-001

slumdev 5y ago
> they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship Telling someone their beliefs aren't valid is rude if they're preaching something like flat earth or "law of attraction" or Lysenkoism, but it's not the end of the world. However, telling someone their beliefs aren't valid when those beliefs are merely unpopular or inconvenient reduces the credibility of the "fact checker" and increases the hostility and insularism of the person with these beliefs. In early 2020, the fact checkers told us that anything less than an N95 mask doesn't work. The fact checkers of today tell us that any face mask prevents the transmission of the virus, and they've even come up with words like "anti-masker" to dehumanize people who question them or who merely adhere to their early 2020 statements. In mid-2020, the fact checkers told us that the lab leak theory was preposterous, and promoting it was a Facebook/Twitter excommunicable offense. Today, this idea is mainstream. In early 2021, the fact checkers told us that the vaccine stops the spread of the virus. In mid-2021, the fact checkers told us that the vaccine reduces symptom severity. Today, mainstream fact checkers are recognizing that vaccine immunity wanes and is ineffective against new variants. Fact checkers seem to be wrong more often than they're right. So why does the fact checker get to decide what I can post on Facebook and Twitter?

steve76 5y ago

So this is version 1 of the research. It reads to me like they are covering for social media. No regulations please: >In sum, these analyses suggest that people do not engage in online political hostility by accident. Online political hostility reflects deliberate intentions to be hostile, formed by individuals who are hostile whether they engage with others online or offline and who seek out the possibility of being hostile in both online and offline contexts. In the large discussion networks formed online, people are much more likely to observe the actions of such individuals, whereas their actions are more private in offline settings. One potential implication of this argument is that the online contexts have provided people with a more accurate – and not more biased – understanding of just how contentious political topics are for some. And this is the latest version, version 4. It reads like they want a professional class of trained social media moderators: >These results imply that policies against hostility should seek to reduce the connectivity of hostile individuals, for example,by decreasing the visibility of the content they produce or increasing the possibility of enforcing legal actions against illegal behavior(Haidt and Rose-Stockwell 2019). Of course, these policies need to be finely balanced in order to not curtail the freedom of expression. >Furthermore, our findings show that norms of civility are somewhat weaker online than offline, and continued exposure to hostile messages may increase this gap, potentially propelling more hostility through a vicious cycle(Brady et al. 2021). >Consequently, our research is consistent with prior findings that interventions strengthening norms or highlighting norm-violations can reduce hostility(Matias 2019; Siegel and Badaan 2020). At the same time, it is relevant to highlight the danger in encouraging users to set and to police norms of civility, as this may ignite novel forms of hostility about appropriateness and could undermine goals of improving the general tone of online discussions. From this perspective, public discourse should inform the setting of norms, but third-party referees –such as platform policies or trained moderators–would be mainly responsible for promoting and enforcing them in specific discussion networks. Are you allowed to do that? Same exact results, but completely different outcome and instructions on what to do next.

motohagiography 5y ago

How is the "hostility gap" in the paper not just what happens when you remove physical consequences from these people and people like them? The authors appear to do some free association with status seeking and threatening others as well, and I'd wonder whether there is a clearer way to present the ideas. Having met and known trolls personally in real life growing up online and working for ISPs in the 90s, to me they fell into a few categories. The most obvious one was the assorted personality disorders that were just really damaged goods. It was a blessing to the world they found the internet instead of preying on people in real life, which surely at least a few did. The ostensibly sane ones were a kind of henchmen to bullies who lacked the physicality and charisma of the bully they followed and instead could reify their cruelty and revenge fantasies online and get off on the attention. The final group was nihilistic political operators, who got into politics because having an opposition team is an outlet for an urge to be a piece of shit to others, and it's a kind of sport to them. You see them disrupting and derailing conversations with talking points, arbitrary racism and hostility to keep thoughtful people away from a controversial topic, and low effort comments. They worked up from activist groups to political party "rat f-er" operatives, and in a more successful life they might have been spies, prosecutors, or jail guards. From what I can tell about the trolls I met, I think they are trying to become something more contemptible than they already feel they are, as a way to reclaim their own shame and self-hatred by rebasing their identity on something can they control, instead of self-identifying by the life event that made them feel ashamed. There's nothing you could say that will make them feel worse than they already feel about themselves, and unless you are capable of delivering a level of psychological harm that is competitive to their personal peak negative experience, and only with internet arguments, anything you say just makes them feel stronger. This is how they thrive on the negativity. You just can't get drawn in. In terms of how this effects online discussion? I'd be concerned the paper has a bunch of policy prescriptions buried somewhere in it, and the solutions aren't in the domain of policy. It may be as simple as judiciously booting accounts that don't meet a bar instead of legalistic lowest common denominator rules for trolls to litigate against, and teaching young people that cruelty is an expression of need.

cptnapalm 5y ago
Your comment about the removal of physical consequences reminded me of this quote from Robert E. Howard: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

dukeofdoom 5y ago

People spouting things online, would never say them in real life, for fear of getting punched in the face. Its interesting to me that the threat of violence is a useful deterrent in civilized society. Its almost like a paradox. That some underlying threat of violence is what causes us to respect each other in real life to some degree. Perhaps a keyboard that zaps stupid social media users fingers would be a useful deterrent. If it hasn't been invented yet, I'm claiming patent.

watwut 5y ago
Or maybe, the premise is wrong. If fact, those assholes in real life would not be punched into face. They would be cut off and avoided.

exo-pla-net 5y ago

If you scroll down, you can download the pdf to make it more readable on mobile.

dang 5y ago

Recent and related, though the headline is terrible: Online Trolls Just Assholes All the Time, Study Finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334551 - Aug 2021 (27 comments)

noduerme 5y ago

I don't know if anyone else felt this, but I've experienced a real sense of calm and relief in the past couple days since reading an analysis of this paper. I'm not on social media (except Nextdoor - ugh), but sometimes I find it hard to not challenge people who say really noxious things in online comments. I was brought up in a family of legal scholars who approach political and interpersonal debate with facts, proofs, and Socratic reasoning. And so I fall into arguing with online trolls who seem to sense that they can get me worked up just by their sheer unwillingness to engage in civil, reasonable conversation. My takeaway from this paper was that it's not the online environment causing otherwise-normal people to act as trolls. It's that online trolls drown out more reasonable voices, and that they're not nice people in real life. They meet the definition of psychopaths. They are not people who can be swayed by logic or nuance IRL any more than they could be online. They're likely not even interested in whatever falsehoods they're spouting other than trying to get satisfaction by pushing people's buttons. In other words, if you ran into them at a bar, you wouldn't have a conversation with them. You wouldn't even go to the places they go. You wouldn't have them over to dinner and try to have a civil discussion. They are too busy at home beating their wives or whatever it is psychotic people do when they're not trolling online. And this gave me a sense of relief, because now I feel I can ignore them better. I can think of them as people like my SO's abusive father, or my abusive half-brother. People you just don't speak to and don't engage because you won't give them the satisfaction. I know "don't feed the trolls" is nothing new, per se, but somehow it's something I've been good at IRL and bad at online for most of my life. Because online I give people the benefit of the doubt that they're more than what they appear to be at first blush. This essentially proves that they are one-to-one the same people you wouldn't have anything to do with in real life, and for me that's a powerful reason to just walk away and ignore them.

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago

Abstract: Politics on the internet doesn't make people assholes. Instead, assholes are drawn to, and conspicuously visible in, politics on the internet. That's an encouraging thought.