>outside the internet… your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth.
I see this written a lot on the internet, but it diverges pretty strongly from what I see in real life, i.e. people run their mouths all the time.
The difference I see is that, on the internet, pretty much every interaction is with a stranger you’ll never talk to again, so there is no point in trying to build a rapport.
Social media won't improve until there is a button I can click to slap the person who wrote it, paraphrasing that famous bash.org quote.
Mind you, I'm not talking about government laws. In the real world, moderation is highly distributed: anyone that has to listen to you can "moderate" you.