I think your four points are all absolutely true. However, I cannot plausibly think of a reason why we _wouldn't_ have a disproportionate amount of online bad behavior from the mentally ill. There's really almost nothing in the online environment to prevent it, and quite a lot of mental conditions result in manic phases of some sort that would cause them to spew a lot of it online.

I can think of a reason, in two parts: lots of people are motivated by things other than mental health to behave negatively online; most people with mental illness are already afraid of being blamed and targeted.

Certainly not every, perhaps not even most, people with mental health issues spew venom online. However, a disproportionate amount of the invective which I hear when walking downtown in a city, comes from people with obvious mental health issues. There may be many others who are silently struggling with mental health issues who walk by me on the sidewalk, but even a few people who are very much not silent can numerically overwhelm the amount of invective said by the rest of the population. Given that the online environment gives the online equivalent of these few people a bullhorn to broadcast at a much greater scale, the problem is likely disproportionately worse online.

So I had a whole bunch of questions but I couldn’t get around this one: why is the choice for people with mental illness invective or struggling in silence? Don’t you realize that’s incentivizing invective?

What do you want us to do, just die and be a “curious” story you read about after the fact?

>>most people with mental illness are already afraid of being blamed and targeted.

On what evidence do you base this on?

Being a person with mental illness in a community of people with mental illness and routinely talking about this all day long every day

It could be that the people who have the type of mental illnesses that are associated with fear of social persecution/rejection are the kind that seek a community of people with a similar affliction, while those with anti-social mental illnesses, like sociopathy, do not.

It could be that the people who don't understand mental illness characterize it in harmful ways and people with mental illness who associate together are readily familiar with that.

How do you know I don't mental illness? And how was the way I characterized it harmful?

I didn’t say either of those things. But in the interest of being candid, I think it’s harmful to categorize mental illness as socially bad versus socially good. My ADHD and Autism are both often characterized as socially bad, and I’m just a person who struggles to take care of myself or maintain communication with my friends and family.

> My ADHD and Autism

I can understand if you feel bad about the article, then. Autism is a bit often discussed here at HN, is it?

At the same time, the article focuses on borderline (BPD), which is very different from autism or ADHD, is it?

I had a mental illness too (something else than BPD, autism and ADHD). Like you, I didn't write or say anything bad to others. Still, I appreciate the article, I think it's a small step for me towards understanding the Internet even better:

I know a borderline person, and I'm not the slightest surprised if in some cases, such a person can write extremely mean things to others on the internet. The person I know, does this in real life to people s/he loves, when too stressed up (about minor things others wouldn't think much about). It's not her fault; instead, s/he had a bad childhood.

(At the same time, there're also, of course, many other reasons for bad behavior on the net.)

I know several people who are borderline. Some I know or have known quite closely. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize their contribution to harmful internet behavior as disproportionate without also quantifying their proportion of internet behavior (it’s small).

And I definitely don’t think it’s fair to qualitatively describe the relative level of bad internet behavior of people with mental illness based on the behavior of people with personality disorders, which is just a subset of mental illness.

Edit: and not all people with personality disorders just go around the world/internet acting harmfully.

> Part 3:

>Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment.

It's not "the internet". It's social media and news. Which is funded by advertising, so optimises for "engagement" (emotional content). A mean comment in Usenet will die unread. A mean comment on Facebook/Twitter will get algorithmically amplified because it causes others to interact with it.

This is interesting, but it's missing the parts around the amplification and institutionalization processes.

Imagine if all of the world's troubling content were in the 'comments section'. Would anyone care? No. The 'comments section' doesn't get widely distributed, it's not backed by institutions or influential individuals etc..

In order for these kerfluffles to have impact they need to be picked up on by supposedly credible institutions, with a wide reach.

If the 'Cancel This Person' Tweet were to stay entirely on Twitter among regular people - nobody would care that much.

But when the media gets hold, backs it, propagates it, institutions start to adjust possibly by making statements, withholding funding etc. - that's what causes major concern and material influence.

More powerful systems and forces use statements made by individuals (often decontextualized) as fodder in their wars over attention, money and ideology.

I never made the connection to part 2 in the abstract before, that makes total sense. If you're walking down the street and see someone with two noses, you're going to notice, not the 20 other "normal" people you passed at the same time. Why wouldn't the same carry over to reading text or watching videos?

This is an interesting idea, feel free to ignore this comment :)