The Internet Isn’t Getting More Toxic. It Just Feels That Way
Being rude to one another online is “an inherent part of our behavior.”
As conventional wisdom would have it, the internet is more toxic than ever. Anyone old enough to have been around during the 2010s can remember Twitter as a place where people made friends and Instagram as a distribution platform for breakfast-plate portraiture. Now, it seems, we’re all locked in unending flame wars, egged on by malevolent algorithms, foreign agents and nefarious bots.
A group of researchers tested this thesis by gathering 500 million comments people had made at different times in the past 34 years on eight popular online platforms, from Usenet to Facebook. The team then ran the data through a machine-learning tool Google developed to help moderators flag toxic content, which it classifies as any “rude, disrespectful or unreasonable comment likely to make someone leave a discussion.”