YouTube? Deleted comment. Twitter? Banned, Reddit? Shadow banned and blocked Xbox live? You get kicked out online mode despite you are PAYING for it. You can’t express your anger or hate towards other people without some kind of freedom.
No I’m not saying that RACISM or serious accusations should be allowed, but a simple “fuck u” gets you eliminated. Is depressing.
People have always cared about being insulted. Being a kind person is a fundamental survival instinct. Humans are social animals, and rely on trust. Sometimes people might say egregious things and there’s some room to sternly tell them that they are wrong, or even that what they are saying is harmful.
But this desire to be derogatory to other people just because you disagree with them isn’t healthy. I completely understand the appeal of telling someone to choke on a wet bag of turds when they say they’re pro-life or anti-gay-marriage or something, but that doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just you losing control of your emotions and saying something stupid and getting yourself into trouble.
If someone has said something that upsets you, and you want to say something to them about it, take the time to articulate what the problem is and why it matters to you. Take the high road, and let them be the one to cast the first stone. Then you can report them and get them banned instead of giving them the satisfaction of doing it to you because you broke first.
I NEVER cared about taking the high road. I would feel like a… See? This is Problem, I can’t talk freely
You can talk freely, you just don’t have the emotional intelligence to talk in a way that people want to listen to, so people show you the door.
What you have discovered is that antisocial behavior has negative social consequences.
Not OP but had a thought reading your comment. I wonder how much of this perceived shift in language is driven by corpo’s sanitizing for advertisers and how much is young people who have been fully raised online.
As you say, humans are social animals. It makes sense to me then, that if you were raised within an online environment you would naturally extend that sociability to it. However, if much of this technology grow after you were socialized would you be more inclined to see it as a relief valve to vent anger into.
It is more an issue that the Internet lets people hide behind anonymity and avoid witnessing the actual consequences of their cruelty. It’s the same dynamic that can cause road rage: if they can’t see your face they don’t have to acknowledge your humanity, and therefore don’t have to care if they hurt you.
And that’s the issue. You can’t vent anger into the Internet without being an angry person in front of or at others. The Internet isn’t a soulless network of machines, it’s filled with real people. If you use other people as your anger relief valve, those people aren’t going to like you or want you around.