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A comment on Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in public. Parent comment

Re:Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in... by cgriswald on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @09:34AM (#23986455)
That’s tantamount to saying as long as you don’t share your opinions, you’ll be fine. (That’s the conclusión people have reached, hence the article.) A huge amount of our communication is digital. Neighbors talk to each other over Nextdoor. Coworkers email, slack, and zoom. People whip out their phones to record strangers behaving badly/strangely/in an arbitrary way they don’t like. Any of that can and does get posted online and it doesn’t matter how irrelevant your online presence might have previously been.

Nothing about internet broadcasting is new. We’ve been doing that for decades. People were already talking on forums and Usenet in the 90s, which could be easily shared with a link or televised. In 2010 Facebook had been open to the public for 4 years and Twitter had millions of tweets each day. We didn’t see this same type of mass mob behavior back then. Diversity of opinion was far more tolerated, and the majority of internet users today developed an online presence of some kind in this environment.

Now in 2020, even those past posts can incite the mob, regardless of whether they were controversial or not at the time.

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Re:Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in... by helen___keller on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @10:18AM (#23986914)
The internet was, and still is, in it's infancy.

You can be frustrated with internet mobs all you want. I am as well. I've had people I care about cancelled over nothing.

But let's not deny reality. The world and the internet is VASTLY more connected, in the mainstream sense, than it was 10 or 30 years ago. My grandma is on Facebook and my employer pays top dollar to curate their businesses' online presence.

The internet has never been a more dangerous place to share your real opinions with your real name attached, and people need to recognize this. There's no reason to believe it's going to get better from here, and there's all the reason to believe it's going to get worse.

[ Parent | on HN ]