The Psychology of Online Political Hostility
psyarxiv.com
psyarxiv.com
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
> content that focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts
Except those companies are in the business of emotional disregulation in the name of “engagement”.
Last thing I want is for them to have even more authority on the participants’ emotional states. When not riled up through manipulation of what they see, most people have a good sense of how to be good to each other.
The other problem is social media getting overrepresented in comparison to real world interactions in our lifetime of discourses. I want the full experience of the disagreeable other, ideally in a friend, so that we can hold the tension of disagreement with some love and beers. Textual/propositional discourse is a mere simulation of this, we’re all stranger brains in vats spitting out argumentation in a truncated form of existence. Perception of being right overcomes the actual need for being right and being held in positive regard. We’re here more to impress, and less to dialogue and cohere.
I've looked through some of these people's profiles before and I've been shocked to find that in non-political discussions they're pretty normal. They're not trolls per se, unless you threaten (using this loosely, such as believing in or having experiences counter to) something core to their identity or way of life.
My takeaway, thus far, has been that without you being physically sat in front of someone they can't observe how something so close and dear to them could possibly hurt someone. They can't imagine that something that seems "righteous" could alienate people or the wrong people if their purpose was to alienate. They only see that through the various signals we can't capture in a DOM or across HTTP.
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.
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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.
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.
Eg, mentioning the Proud Boys, but not Antifa — the violent street gang who committed billions in arson, murdered dozens, and is still pepper-spraying children in Portland parks. You picked the smaller street gang, likely because you’re politically aligned with the larger, more violent one.
I don’t disagree that many groups are “bad” — but that doesn’t mean I believe we can regulate that without the censorship being corrupted into something worse.
I suspect this is a serious factor. In the before-times, the ability of these people to meaningfully organize was hampered by their comparative rarity and geographical distribution. The consequences of those two factors created a damping effect: the majority of their social interactions were with non-extremists, giving them neither a chance to express extremism nor mutually reinforce their extreme beliefs.
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.
This is a bad argument.
Perhaps try "humans capable of living in and contributing to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
and, unfortunately, I think you'll often find the answer is that they are not, nor do they wish to exist in one. They want power and total control over, hilariously, the lives of others who simply want to live in and contribute to a civilized and prosperous modern society.
They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show that they're incapable of coexisting with others who don't share their same close-minded fantastical views.
> fully human
This is a bad argument.
So it didn't start off well, and I immediately felt that the comment was either reactionary or using my comment as a trampoline to project some tangential point.
Perhaps try "humans capable of living in and contributing to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
and, unfortunately, I think you'll often find the answer is that they are not, nor do they wish to
exist in one. They want power and total control over, hilariously, the lives of others who simply
want to live in and contribute to a civilized and prosperous modern society.
They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show that they're incapable of coexisting with others who don't share their same close-minded fantastical views.
You're doing a common technique of insulting someone's ability when really you mean that they hurt you or you hate them for some reason.
Isolated self-sufficient people, severely disabled people, children with terminal illnesses, very old people, etc. all meet your definition. Do you really have something against people for not being born with the ability to do valuable work for others? I doubt it.
That sounds very, very strange to me. I know I'm the one that's weird here, but wow.
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.
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.
That's an encouraging thought.
It’s simultaneously correct to describe them as being “more acidic” online, but practically, the penny arcade cartoon seems to fit better.
(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…)
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.
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.
Most people are fuckwads that have to pretend they are human beings out in public due to culture.
Anonymity removes that pressure.
Online Trolls Just Assholes All the Time, Study Finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334551 - Aug 2021 (27 comments)