> It is possible that the Internet has increased politically motivated killings, but articles making broad judgement on all of society based on a couple of anecdotes without proper data is just sensationalist nonsense.

I don't see where the author makes "broad judgement of all society." I see an opinion piece, which explicitly calls out in the text it's opinionness ("that's how I've come to feel about the Internet") in which the author claims that the Internet "creates terrorists."

This is not an argument that needs statistics or data to back it up - if the Internet creates even one terrorist, then the author's statements hold. The author provides not one, but several examples to support the claim.

It's like you are refuting the headline only, or some adversarial interpretation of the article.

The headline sets the tone so you can't just ignore it. If he starts off with an extremely strong headline like "The Internet Will Be the Death of Us" then the article should have strong enough arguments to warrant it, otherwise the headline is just the kind of misinformation that he himself is lamenting in this very article.

yup : "Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jewish Americans in Pittsburgh the morning after Sayoc’s arrest, stoked his madness and nurtured his bloody fantasies in that same online vortex."

as if there were no other, much older, much more efficient, way to become a killer. Such as : education (think about special forces training), brainwashing (think about suicide attacks), political activism (think about political terrorism in the 60's/70's in europe), etc.

problem with that kind of articles is that it makes it more acceptable to track everything on the web.

When you are in an echo chamber created by social media, the dehumanization required to make you a killer is mich more subtle, more easy and more covert.

All the methods you have mentioned, are, to some extent in the public eye. Imagine the uproar if anti-semitic articles occured in any of the daily news papers. It is a matter of public record, even if some of the methods come out later. Now imagine how many such articles are published and propagandized in online media, away from the gaze of critics, away from serious action by concerned authorities. The power is in the hands of big data companies and they are driven by greed and stock market performance.

Once the papers die, people will start dying too.

There having been equivalent evils before the internet does nothing to disprove the thesis of it causing harm. Even if you could show that the internet, is net positive (pun intended), I don't see how that would be an argument against possible further improvements.

Analogy: People being killed in accidents with horses is not an argument for disregarding traffic deaths. Nor can that fact be used to argue against seat belts or airbags. Only if someone were proposing to go back to horse & carriage would it make sense to reference total effects.

If "the internet" wants to avoid the fate of more regulation, it is most sensible to take its critics' worries serious, and to try to find ways to be a positive force in the world without inviting the sort heavy-handed regulations that will otherwise follow.

As but one example, see spam, or child pornography: in those areas, tech companies, users, and governments found ways to effectively work together mostly without resorting to draconian measures.

For an example of such a process failing, look at the EU's recent "link tax": Because the tech community has been so adamantly opposed to taking journalism's existential fears into account, this rather unwieldy regulation will become law. This could have been avoided if, for example, ad blockers had settled for blocking only dangerous and/or the most annoying ads, an approach that could have easily reduced annoyances by 80%+ while costing publishers far less. Or micropayments that actually work, and users to use them. Etc.

The ads that aren’t “annoying” still violate your privacy. I don’t want to load any of them.

You seem to be coming from a literal reading of the headline. The absurdity of that should be pretty clear. After all, it can be disproven by a single death of one of "us" that isn't caused by or related to the internet.

Because of its absurdity, that interpretation of the headline can't be correct. So instead of cheap shots (without evidence) about the NYT, you should maybe try to find a valid interpretation, of which there are several. Personally, I'd focus on the "Us". In this reading, it laments the metaphorical death of community, and society's disintegration into autistic strangers.

But the country was full of sects long before the Internet was even a thing. The Oklahoma City bombers are a good example of terrorists which were radicalized by offline cults. The only difference is that now anyone can see it online while before it was hidden unless you looked for it.

Like your racist uncle, before people just heard him rant at the thanksgiving table but now the whole world can read his rants on Facebook. The racism was always there, it is just harder to ignore today.

So I'd like to see proof that the Internet actually helps radicalize people. It is true that it makes it easier to find radical groups, but it also makes it easier to find other views which would hinder radicalization. Before if you made a few radical friends they could easily become your whole world! So my naive assumption is that both forces roughly cancels each other out making an open Internet mostly neutral in terms of radicalization.

ISIS does its recruitment over the internet for one... Local cults of hatred have become global now.

"now"

A hundred years ago, anarchists were shooting people from Milwaukee to St Petersburg. Marxism-Leninism literally took over multiple countries. As long as you have global movement and communications, you have global spread of ideology, you don't need the Internet.

I don't think anybody is denying the existence of evil before the internet. But that truism proofs nothing except that the internet is not a necessary condition for every single extremist to be radicalised.

As long as you have cows you will have hamburgers, indeed! But the availability of cheese can nonetheless change the frequency of hamburger, as well as their individual qualities.

By using the internet for radicalisations (a fact almost universal along recent attackers in the US) these people have quite clearly demonstrated their believe in the effectiveness of the net for their cause.

We usually rely on local, individual decision-making to optimise everything, and I don't see a reason why these people (despite their obvious moral failures) should be an exception from this dramatically successful concept. This evidence becomes even stronger considering we're looking at the subset of "successful" attackers.

It also feels intuitively correct to consider the net a tool that helps such movement. That's just because by default, it seems to help almost every endeavour in some way or other. Radicalising a young white nationalist isn't much different from getting them to vote or buy a specific brand of sneakers. If anything, the specific challenges of illegal activities of a small, geographically dispersed set of loners seem to be a unique fit to this particular tool.

The article does put a (in my opinion, unwarranted) focus on actual violence. I don't think the death of community is well expressed by listing a bunch of isolated facts by a half-dozen of lunatics.

War tends to increase violence. The anxieties that are reflected in elections recently as well as the people taking advantage of them to rise to power will make it easier to start one.