A new study links partisan activity on the Internet to widespread online toxicity, revealing that politically-engaged users exhibit uncivil behavior even in non-political discussions. The findings are based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million Reddit users.

Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic – even in non-political subreddits::A new study links partisan activity on the Internet to widespread online toxicity, revealing that politically-engaged users exhibit uncivil behavior even in non-political discussions. The findings are based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million Reddit users.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    92·
    1 year ago

    No shit?

    If you are discussing the exploitation of labor and people are bitching and moaning that “lazy devs” are taking too long to release a patch, you aren’t going to grin and say how awesome of a burn that was on those losers who just got purged in a layoff. Because social and political issues permeate everything we do. Hell, we have people who are insisting that one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet re-platforming alex jones is “not tech news”.

    Which gets to the other aspect. Reddit, and Lemmy, has a tendency to never consider the source of a problem. Going back to the lazy devs example: Most moderators have zero issue with “This is trivial to implement and they are wasting their time making trailers or adding new skins”. It doesn’t violate any rules (and, even if it does, you can’t gather that from just the single comment). But when someone points out how toxic that narrative is? Suddenly this becomes a flame war (because nobody can accept they might not be perfect) and the entire branch gets nuked… except that initial lazy devs commentary is still there.

    Sometimes that is intentional by the moderators (the lemmy.world 3d printing board has some good examples of that…). Mostly it is just because… being a moderator sucks and it is rare that a burst of traffic doesn’t involve a disproportionate burst of flaming and trolling. So suddenly they are inundated with angry people from all around whereas last week they had just a few porn posts a day.

    But pretty much all of this is an extension of “tone policing”. Someone saying the world would be a better place if you and everyone like you were executed or enslaved? Better be careful how you respond. If you don’t smile enough, then YOU are the problem. So lighten up and learn that both sides have a point and maybe you should be the bigger person and only breathe 20% of the day instead of 90%.