Many people who loudly pride themselves for tolerance, kindness, and openness toward difference drop those principles the moment someone expresses a preference or view they dislike. Disagreement itself is fine. What is not fine is the usual responses that follows: comments whose main purpose is to insult, shame, and make the other person feel small, delivered in front of an audience that can be counted on to approve.
It’s status performance. The goal is not to show why the opinion is wrong or change minds; it is to hurt the speaker and fish for applause. Feeling morally justified does not change the nature of the act; when the sole intention is to hurt they’re being evil and a bully.
The people who upvote or otherwise reward those insults are part of the same behavior. Standing by and cheering while someone is targeted is participation. It supplies the social payoff that makes the cruelty worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons large parts of the internet feel needlessly hostile. When perceived moral superiority is used as cover for meanness, and when an audience reliably encourages it, the result is environments where many people simply stop speaking. The claimed values of kindness and tolerance are revealed, in those moments, as conditional.
And no, this isn’t about being tolerant towards people with extreme views. The idea for this post was sparked by my previous post about AI music and the vicious personal attacks I received for admitting to enjoying some of it.
Adam Curtis in the docu Hypernormalization makes an interesting point about the moralization of politics, how since 9/11 politicians have increasingly used “deceptive myths of good vs evil”. And I think that has become a large part of online discourse.
Polarization is profitable because it drives engagement. You have one meme mocking the position of the other side and the other side has a counter meme, and together they boost each other, slowly mutate into more extreme forms. So people increasingly see each other as extreme versions. But it also makes your own side more extreme and unyielding.
And the rise of trolls with climate denial and ending in Trump being cheered for his psychological terror campaign shows where we are today. I suspect it evolved naturally as a response to the unrelenting stupidity by the fascist MAGA trolls. But it’s not just maga that is fine denying reality, denying logical arguments and resorts to demonizing the ideological enemy. It is good vs evil all the way down now.
Meanwhile the true evil, the class warfare of the plutocrats against us, is largely ignored. Instead “tankies” and the more extremist communist who actually offer an alternative ideology that could provide a different perspective and a way out of our current situation have been defederated and banned from the largest group of lemmy instances. And that was only possible through this extremification of the ideological opponent as evil.
The same absolutely applies to fuckai. You still get comments that LLMs only copy and randomly rearrange text in their database and cannot reason at all. Which is objectively false. And you get the avalanche of hate.
Same with pointing out that the absolute evidence the CIA funded and trained the organizer of the maidan protests in the Ukraine and the evidence of the massacre being a false flag by far right nazi sympathizers, therefor rendering the question of fault and diplomatic solutions more nuanced than what is allowed in public discourse.
Meanwhile on topics like banning hate speech, where there shouldn’t be any tolerance, there is.
So I do think you’re mostly right, but it’s not so much done out of cruelty, but because we’ve all been trained like dogs by social media to behave like this and enjoy the bliss of group approval. Kinda like The Orville episode about the base democratic society they encounter. Reality and truth is what the majority decides it is.
there is not definition of hate speech that everyone can agee on, this is part of why hate speech is protected by the first amendment in the US.
Paradox of tolerance
yes, and the first ammendment to the US constitution solves it by not giving a shit about what individuals do.
Only if you consider sticking its head in the sand to be solving the issue.
You made some good points. This comment would have been a lot more palatable if you didn’t then proceed to bring .ml propaganda into it.
From where I stand it seems that dehumanization is the tool used there and nowadays people are increasingly quick to dismiss the entire person based on a single bit of information about them (which often isn’t even true). And now that they’re not even considered a human anymore anything goes. That’s how you get otherwise normal people acting in horrific ways and history is filled with examples of that.