Comment on Are We All Becoming More Hostile Online?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Online commenters increasingly show binary thinking - the attitude that there are exactly two sides to every issue - the Right one and the Wrong one. Questioning ANY aspect of the Right one means you’re obviously a hardcore supporter of EVERY aspect of the Wrong one. You’re either morally and ethically pure or your character is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. To me it’s a really paradoxical way of thinking about diversity and acceptance - more like you’re supposed to either embrace people or despise them.
Yeah. I see a surprising amount of it on Lemmy. It is behavior I’m used to seeing from the far right, Qanon, and other brainwashed vectors. I watched the Russians propagandize the right on Reddit.
These, however, are nominal leftists engaging in stark black and white thinking. I’m not sure if they’re state level shills, bots, really believe it and are brainwashed tankies, or true believers living in China or similar. Maybe it’s dumb kids being taken in by propaganda.
Calling the binary thinkers leftists or shills of some other thing is just another form of simplistic binary thinking - put a black hat on them and boom, you’re done. I think this is a lot of people’s way of dealing with the constant firehose of information we think we have to process because it’s in our endless feeds. We have an always full inbox, and some of us deal with that by processing each item as fast as possible, using minimal thought to tell ourselves we’ve got it figured out so we can swipe on it and scroll on to the next issue. This is leading to a pattern of superficial snap judgements, stereotyping, and ultimately various forms of social bigotry.
The point I’m driving at is that they are spouting leftist talking points but have cranked up the fervor to 11. It’s frothing at the mouth type behavior and it genuinely confuses me as to if that is a real viewpoint or a shill. I’m not making a binary snap judgment, I’m questioning if that’s even a real person and what happened to them if they are real.
Oh sorry, you said “nominal” leftists and I misinterpreted.
I think it’s more dumb kids than anything.
I try to correct it where I can because hopefully a handful will reconsider their stance and grow as a person, but they certainly won’t admit to it.
I agree - the tone of so many posts is very similar to 13-year-olds calling mom a bitch for making them go to the dentist.
This is usually how people treat fascists. Not sure what’s surprising about it
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
It’s not new, it happened a lot on Reddit, and I get a bit of that in real life too.
People are tribalist, and that sucks.
For example, if you read Lemmy comments without any real world experience, you’d think everyone who voted for Trump hates brown people and wants poor people to die. But I have family and close friends who voted for that douchebag, and they are good people, they just thought he’s a better option (and they generally don’t follow politics too much). And I don’t blame them, Harris had a crappy campaign, basically promising the same bad policies Biden had, and Clinton before her was worse. Why should they be interested in politics if we keep getting poor options?
People aren’t black and white. Yet we caricaturize them as such.