“I hate x and wish they had never been born”
Is not
“I am coming to your house tomorrow with a weapon”
Yet people treat them similarly.
From there it just becomes “anything that scares me is a threat.”
Then, it becomes obvious that people are in general scared of cultures and attitudes very different from their own.
And so there’s no tolerant chaos anymore.
It’s a Motte and Bailey argument.
Very few people support doxxing and/or incitements to violence.
But it is amazing how much censorship happens in the pursuit of curbing such threats.
But that concept is thrown out the window when it comes to Twitter/Facebook/etc.
I can't count how many times I've read "I'm literally shaking now" used as an indictment against someone else's perceived transgression. I think out of all the twitter cliches, that one makes me roll my eyes the most.
If it were a credible threat of physical harm (it rarely is), then I'd make a police report and be more vigilant with my self-defence preparation and tell my loved ones to be accordingly.
Attempting to censor the information would be pointless at best, and could easily make it worse.
I believe a lot of the internet of that era changed with Facebook: it was the first prominent social media that encouraged (mandated even) you to use your real name and information and a lot of people went with it. Myspace, MSN or similar before that were all aliases even if you knew the people in real life. This removed a level of privacy and made attacks more personal.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comments. Whenever I read something hurtful or mean directed to me on the internet, I can very easily just shrug it off as "some internet person" and move on, although admittedly I've never been target harassed like some people have, which I'm sure is distressing. I think part of this was growing up I was always told: "Don't use your real name online! Don't give out your personal info!", and so for me, being online was always about being someone else, a different persona if you will. These days that seems completely out of the window, everyone uses their real names everywhere, uploads actual pictures of themselves and generally their real life seems directly integrated into their online life, which is just unthinkable for me. This probably makes online abuse just that much more personal for them?
I suppose another big change of course is that all the small forums that used to make up the internet are now exceedingly being consolidated into just one or two sites. Again, back when I was a child trawling the internet, if you didn't like one forum, you just hopped to another, and there were always plenty more (sidenot: remember the 'affiliate' tags on sites? I miss those. Made the internet feel more like a big group of communities, but I digress). Of course now, if someone is being harassed on twitter or facebook or something, well, they're not going to go somewhere else because a lot of the competition no longer exists anymore.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment honestly, I'm just ranbling. What I do know is that regulating the internet is, and always has been, completely futile. So long as someone, somewhere, can spin up a forum on a VPS or on a computer at home, and people can connect to it, there's going to be sites hosting every kind of content imaginable. If they can't even bring down the Pirate Bay with the music industries power and money, they'll never stop people saying nasty things.