In these anecdotes, the people mentioned are rebelling for different reasons, in an effort to control choices relating to personal habits, as they modify what are perceived as necessary social obligations and compulsory public behavior, when interacting with modern technology and devices.

The concept of civil debate and discourse is, in large part a thing of the past. Issue any opinion, politely, well reasoned on facebook and you most likely be savaged.

Even in the small city I live in, population ~87,000, there are two regular philosophy meet ups and a skeptics group. The local state university hosts regular guest speakers. There is a tonne of podcasts and books produced from around the world with vastly differing opinions.

As for university talks, at least at my university they were attended by a tiny minority of students. Most students went only to the lectures they had to for class and did something else in their free time than go to more lectures. Outside of students and the occasional professor, it was rare for these talks to be attended by anyone else, unless someone really famous was talking -- even then, only a small minority of the people in the surrounding area would even hear of these events, much less bother to go.

The sad fact is that most people, in the US at least, aren't very interested in intellectual pursuits like this. They'd much rather go to a ballgame, party, watch TV, or hang out at the bar.

But those 87 people know and talk to 100 other people each,that's 10% of the city.

Go two degrees of separation and it's the whole town.

Students in a town generally only know other students. Students are actually pretty secluded. But normal people? They know their families, they know their friends, they know their colleagues, the people they do their hobbies with, their local shop owners, the people in their local Baby groups, the other parents in their schools, the people who the volunteer with, etc.

It's about how ideas spread, not about how many people are in one group.

While it's true that each of the people at these tiny gatherings probably know and talk to at least 10 people each, and those people talk to another 10 people each, that doesn't mean that they're talking about philosophy or skepticism. Most people just don't want to hear about either of those subjects, or anything else intellectual.

My guess is things like this are a lot more likely to happen in a small city than a large one, or at least a much higher percentage of the population will be involved.

Perhaps rather poorly, I was trying to point out that aggression and hostility are now normalized discourse for the masses. I expect stupidity on facebook, but naked hostility is now the norm in my opinion.

Facebook flame wars seem rather tame by what used to be considered the civil way to resolve numerous types of disputes

Personally I quit social media and the world seems a lot kinder. Perhaps you need to just take a break

That's Facebook's business model (and what made them a useful stooge during the election).

The monetisation is one aspect of course but a lot of the toxicity of social media comes from its hyper-politicisation and virtue signalling which coincided with the Millenials coming online. The quality of the discourse was then radically different from Usenet, IRC and other proto-social media like Livejournal.

Sure, but most people use social media to maintain their relationships with people. Kids on Instagram aren't talking to Instagram - they're talking to their peers, friends, family.