
The Conspiratorial Hate We See Online Is Increasingly Appearing in Real Life - IBM
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/mailbomb-pittsburgh-shooting-online-hate-real-world
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nostromo
The author tries to take a correlation ("crazy people say crazy things
online") and argue it's causation ("crazy things online make people go crazy
in real life").

We've seen this argument a million times before with the boogeyman du jour.
For example: heavy metal and video games caused Columbine.

The problem is that violent crime has dropped as internet use has gone up. And
violent crime has also dropped since social media first became a thing. So
even if this is "a thing" \-- it's not a widespread trend.

Personally I don't think the medium matters. If Columbine or Ruby Ridge or
Waco or Oklahoma City or 9/11 happened today, I'm sure all of these people
would have some sort of social media trail for us to look at and say, "a ha,
this is why this person was radicalized!" followed by, "Twitter and Facebook
and Google need to do a better job censoring their platforms."

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fzeroracer
The mistake you make is correlating the rise of the internet with the
reduction in crime. That correlation could be better explained with the lead-
crime hypothesis rather than assuming that the internet is somehow causing
less crime.

What we have seen is the number of hate crimes increase quite drastically over
the past few years as well as the continued rise of school shootings in
America.

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nostromo
> the continued rise of school shootings in America

Contrary to popular belief, school shootings have been flat since the early
90s:

[https://imgur.com/2uB0QdJ](https://imgur.com/2uB0QdJ)

Full report here:

[https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018036.pdf](https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018036.pdf)

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iamaelephant
That's more horrifying, not less. For 20 years children have been getting shot
at school in your country and you've collectively done nothing meaningful to
stop it.

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olivermarks
Charlie Warzel writing on Buzzfeed reacting to recent events he has read about
online complete with a ridiculous click bait headline epitomizes everything
that's wrong with the confusion between 'news', 'opinion' and even 'satire' in
our blurred world of 'feeds' and information overload.

Free speech and investigative reporting and writing is essential in a
functioning democracy. This is the former but just an inflammatory opinion
piece. ('Why toxic online behavior is spilling into the streets').

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empath75
Online _is_ real life and there’s not a significant difference between someone
making death threats online or over the phone or through the mail and I wish
law enforcement would take it more seriously and start jailing people and not
just laughing it off.

It’ll only take throwing a few obnoxious kids into big boy prison for making
terroristic threats before the ‘pranksters’ stop doing it and we’re left with
the real crazies.

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stephengillie
It's important to remind people that hateful speech is not protected by the
First Amendment in America.

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weberc2
The first amendment absolutely protects hateful speech. It doesn't protect
threats.

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colordrops
BuzzFeed is part of the toxic behavior we see online.

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Anderkent
Example? BuzzFeed News has in my experience been one of the better, if not the
best, news portals.

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lez
Given the definition of crazy = someone who lost connection to the reality. If
you don't agree with somebody on the reality, how do you tell who is the crazy
one? Is it possible that the majority is crazy?

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tychomaz
From buzzfeed “news”. The pot calling the kettle black.

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fzeroracer
A lot of this is because with the rise of the internet we've seen that it's
become easier to push people into these conspiratorial narratives. Before it
was largely limited to relatively local radio shows but now you have large
media sources spreading not-so-subtle news about how the Jews are ruining
America or the deep state controlling your lives.

We see these charlatans spreading vile bigotry and hatred, often directly
resulting in the harm of innocent people. People spreading narratives that
school shootings don't actually exist. The overall audience these people can
reach has grown dramatically and the problem is that it's similar to cult
behavior. You can't actually beat them with facts or through arguments. At a
certain point we're going to need to face this problem head on and treat it as
a proper cult.

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Maro
Antisemitism has widespread roots in Europe going back 100s of years,
unfortunately. It didn't need the Internet to spread :(

