anonymity allows people to be not very nice

Hiding behind keyboard is easy.

Why should people be nice online when there are no tangible consequences to them being evil?

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

-Gandalf the Grey / J R R Tolkein

It’s the result of the “bombastic” mix of false dichotomy, assumptions, and social media dynamics.

False dichotomy prevents you from noticing nuances, complexities, third sides, or gradations. Under a false dichotomy, there’s no such thing as “Alice and Bob are bad, but Alice is worse than Bob”; no, either they’re equally bad (thus both deserve to die), or one of them is good.

In the meantime, assumptions prevent you from handling uncertainties, as the person “fills the blanks” of the missing info with whatever crap supports their conclusion. For example you don’t know if Bob kills puppies or not, but you do know that he jaywalks, right? So you assume that he kills puppies too, thus deserving death.

I’m from the firm belief that people who consistent and egregiously engage in discourse showing both things are muppets causing harm to society, and deserve to be treated as such. (Note: “consistent and egregiously” are key words here. A brainfart or two is fine, as long as there’s at least the attempt of handling additional bits of info and/or complexity.)

Then there are the social media dynamics. I feel like a lot of users here already addressed them really well, but to keep it short: social media gives undue exposure to idiots doing the above due to anonymity, detachment from the situation, self-reinforcing loops (“circlejerks”), so goes on.

Life is cheap on the internet, because people feel far removed (and/or “above it”). Social media “engagement” algorithms divide and isolate people from each other.

(I think as far as Lemmy is concerned, it’s just spillover / remnant behaviors from that stuff. There’s no engagement algorithm here other than what we bring in ourselves.)

Here are a some studies on it from people a lot smarter than me. (Note these are more about general toxicity and hate speech and not zeroed in on your exact question, but they may be helpful).

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.744614/full

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/11547/10076

https://scholars.org/contribution/countering-online-toxicity-and-hate-speech

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-021-00787-4

This one looks at the “why” question from a political POV:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/11/pgad382/7405434?login=false

We’ve been transitioning from a dignity culture to a victimhood/outrage culture for most of my adult life. The relevant one here is the outrage culture, where people are trying their damnedest to be the most outraged. Nothing shows that you are more are outraged by something than suggesting that someone should die for being in disagreement with you.

Relevant: https://www.xkcd.com/2071/

(please mentally adapt for Lemmy instead of Facebook)

As someone older than the public internet, these people and positions always existed. The difference in my opinion is that the 24-hour news cycle and online echo chambers combined with less in-person meeting, particularly with others in the community different to oneself has just further isolated and polarized people. There’s also an argument that heavily-biased cable “news” (which is oftentimes more “opinions” and sometimes “outright lies”) going unchecked has further polarized and divided people.

I’ve found that people on the internet generally have low empathy. If it’s not animal or child abuse, the responses are all over the place.

Part of it is that purity tests are at an all time high. In large part because we are constantly inundated with Content to reinforce our world views (or the world view of the Influencer we glommed on to) constantly. So anything different is not just cognitive dissonance: it is an attack on our very core and a lie. So if someone does something we wouldn’t do? They are the evilest of evil people and are knowingly hurting whoever we care about.

But the other aspect? The internet is a great place to meet people with different life experiences. And in a lot of cases (particularly with certain politicians), we and the people we love have been directly harmed by them. All that steven universe bullshit about needing to love everyone and always finding the good goes out the window when you are increasingly watching organizations try to murder you for embracing who you are and to enslave people and turn them into breeding stock.

And the last aspect is that lemmy has a really bad infestation of tankies. Tankies who, useful idiots or intentional, tend to actively argue for destabilizing The West and increasing conflicts. So advocating for terrorism and murder helps with that.

Its a product of global connectivity but lack of in person connection. If I interact with someone regularly and personally I am unlikely to wish harm on them because they are “part of my tribe.” Via the internet and social media I dont really have a connection with this person, so its easy to think of them as an outsider or them. Once they are outside of my tribe I can remove their humanity and then their death has no moral or emotional cost to me.

Because it’s a bit of an echo chamber and people get too involved in stuff with anonymity. You will find this sort of social behaviour all over the internet and from any “camp”. It’s just bad people.

I tend to block those users very, very quickly. At best, they’re “knee-jerk” types that react violently without thinking. At worst, they’re sociopaths. There’s a lot in between those, but either way, with them blocked, this place is way more chill.

All extremists should be killed.

/s

It’s essentially virtue signalling, whether it’s online or offline. Since nobody is “for” serial rapists, for example (the current Republican candidate for president notwithstanding), the differentiation is being against “by what degree.” Calling for maiming, execution, torture, etc. positions the speaker as “better than” someone who doesn’t, to some people.