Comment by delusional
21 hours ago
You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and connectedness. I have not observed a decrease in peoples willingness to discuss "politically incorrect" topics in real life out of fear.
I have however observed an increasing intolerance for diverging opinions, especially coming from the "politically incorrect" group.
They are not afraid of being called out, they have become intolerant of being called out.
I don't know that I agree with this. I think my information bubble is largely liberal-flavored, and my experience doesn't align with this. I've instead found that those who otherwise embody the most "political correctness" are often the least tolerant of having their views challenged. In fact, my experience has been that the more vocally "progressive" a user is, the more likely they are to resort to cheap zingers and gotchas (politically-correct ones, of course) when their views are challenged (even politely!), instead of engaging in a cooperative way.
I saw this the most in the pre-Musk Twittersphere, but it has metastisized since then. Of course, it's unclear if these types are genuine, trolls, or simply a product of the medium itself, so take it with a grain of salt.
> You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and connectedness
Fully agree with this, though. I suspect this draws out the worst behavior regardless of professed political/moral affiliation
Left-wing fediverse is a good illustration, too. The way things work on Mastodon, if you try to spin up a node, you quickly find out that many such nodes will ban you e.g. simply because you run Pleroma (because it's "made by fascists for fascists"), or even just because your block list doesn't have a sufficient similarity to theirs.
This isn't really anything new though. The same thing used to happen on IRC where the network would semi-frequently split because some relay was k-lined due to some internal politics.
This seems to be an inherent feature of any federated, but otherwise rule-less system.
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A hasty edit left out an important caveat of my prior comment. I was talking about my experience in real life.
Online I would say that every discussion across the political spectrum seems to be dominated by intolerance. Also the left, I agree.
I'm specifically concerned with how those communities affect the real world people I talk to outside of the internet, and there I find that the "anti PC" crowd takes their philosophy along with them much more readily.