So Nasty & So Rude
No, it’s not just you. Online communities have become meaner over the years. From casual cruelty to broadcast hostility, the comments section is now powered by hate. VAGUE Resident Tola asks, what changed — and why?
Have you ever scrolled through the comments section of virtually any social media post and wondered, “Hey, so that’s an insane thing to say”? I have — many times; and these days, it seems to be more often than not. Whether it’s a subtle dig that has one wondering if they were missing the joke or reading too much into it, to flat-out hate or discrimination, I find myself wondering, “Why is the internet so mean?”
Of course, I understand that in this society, there are bigger fish to fry: Palestinians are being starved, the country’s homelessness minister has been forced to resign because she evicted her tenants in order to raise the rent, and our data is up for grabs to the highest bidder. Internet vitriol may seem trivial in comparison, but it’s hard to ignore the increasing rate at which people are becoming far too comfortable speaking to anybody, anyhow.
In my opinion, the internet is where we can create and curate spaces for ourselves to connect and build community with one another. Even before the existence of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, platforms such as Myspace, online chat rooms, and the like were created to help us keep in touch, learn more beyond our immediate realities, and share stories as an alternative means of communication. However, it would be naive to assume or believe that these spaces were free from behaviours that brought into question the stability of one's home and emotional state.
“[Online platforms] were created to help us keep in touch, learn more beyond our immediate realities, and share stories...”
Not so long ago, I came across a rather endearing Twitter post from a guy — most likely in his early 20s — expressing how he was looking forward to a first date. Posted was a picture of the flower he was going to give her and a selfie of him dressed up for the occasion. A reasonable person would expect to find comments supporting this young man and wishing him luck; instead, the complete opposite was found to be true. Shortly after posting, the comments had been hijacked by those making digs at his looks or scrutinising his outfit; while others lamented over how ‘someone like him’ could get a date, and they couldn’t. And it’s no surprise that the majority of those comments were from men, which opens up another can of worms about the male loneliness epidemic and online incel communities. Needless to say, the responses to this young man’s moment of public vulnerability were apathetic at best and cruel at worst, but disturbing and unsettling.
In a conversation with my younger brother, I asked for his take on the situation, and he suggested another interesting motivation for the rising mean streak: entertainment. Whether it’s taking pictures of strangers in public or screenshotting someone's Hinge profile and posting it online, some people seem to simply get a kick out of being mean, finding something about public humiliation in the digital space chuckle-worthy. Not to mention that people are miserable, and while this may sound like a dig, it isn’t. The cost of living is high, the job market is in shambles, people feel stagnated — and it sucks, rightfully so. As cliché as it sounds, but clichés are clichés for a reason — punching down could be their way of making themselves feel better.
During the pandemic, we saw a shift in how people engaged with each other, utilising social media and other online spaces to stay informed about what was going on beyond their immediate environment, staying connected and entertained. I remember a specific period when almost everybody was consistently posting social justice content and infographics on their stories and grids. But then, at some point down the line, we started to hear the phrase ‘allyship fatigue’ with white people, especially white women, declaring that allyship was too emotionally taxing; a critical catalyst for the slow but sure decline of empathy and consideration for people we see today, both on and offline.
Looking back, to claim that this is also when society began to slide back into conservatism would be a fair assumption, especially when considering who was in office in the UK and the US at the time. With right-wing politicians (although I would use that term loosely) in power, liberalism’s perceived loss gives legitimacy to beliefs that actively go against the best interests of the people.
At some point between 2013 and 2014, I joined Tumblr which, briefly put, served as my introduction to social justice 101. In this corner of the internet, I learned about intersectional feminism and encountered terms like ableism. This was during the Obama administration, and during this time, I could scroll for hours before I came across anything remotely hateful. But now, when you have people like Elon Musk, who bought out Twitter in 2022, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, those who are politically aligned with these men no longer have any issue leaving racist comments on posts made by people of colour.
“With right-wing politicians in power, liberalism’s perceived loss gives legitimacy to beliefs that actively go against the best interests of the people.”
Conservatism leaves no room for empathy; as a movement built on individualism, it actively works to create a divide within our communities. When this becomes the new baseline for how to behave within a functioning society, the open disregard for common decency in very real systems like government is then reflected in our online behaviour. This would explain why today, we see more men body shaming women under their posts or making unrelated threads lamenting their own dating lives, or lack thereof. When people are vulnerable or stricken enough to post their GoFundMe pages or request resources for aid, instead of being met with compassion and grace, they’re met with responses like calls to ‘just get a job’, blamed because it ‘sounds like a skill issue’ and similar displays of apathy or dismissal.
With social media, people often operate under the assumption that because a person’s content is readily available, there are no boundaries left to consider when interacting with it. This assumed solicitation then breeds a compulsion to engage with it in whatever way best suits them, typically while displaying an obvious lack of care. Somehow, in having far too much access to one another, we have simultaneously become completely removed from our humanity, unable to recognise an individual's personhood.
There is far more to be said about how digital spaces shape — and distort — our social instincts; what other ways we see this digital antisocial behaviour show up. From performative outrage to casual cruelty disguised as humour, these behaviours chip away at the very idea and purpose of “community” that the internet promised to nurture. But perhaps that’s a conversation best continued outside the comment section.
credits
words — tola folarin-coker
design — gloria ukoh