As a chronically online person, I often find myself pleasantly surprised when people I meet in real life turn out to be… civil. Who would have guessed that people can disagree with each other respectfully?
I meet people in real life, just as online, who hold disagreeable and questionable opinions. However, in real life, I understand why, given their life experience, they think a certain way. I can tell, from their mannerisms, presentation, and other details of their personal life, that they might have grown up in a highly emotionally repressed household, that they have had little exposure to diverse experiences beyond their own, and that they lack the privilege of a cosmopolitan education.
All these reasons keep me from getting angry when someone says or does something that, in other circumstances, would be highly offensive to me. I have also become more understanding of people’s hypocrisies, biases, and moral inconsistencies in real life. In real life, unlike on the internet, we can see the person behind their actions.
Why, then, is the internet uniquely toxic? Surely there are deeper reasons than the fact that online we can’t punch an asshole in the face.
Reason 1: A congregation of neurotics
Neurotic people are more likely than non-neurotic people to be chronically online and to engage in commenting. They are more likely to feel the need to solve unsolvable problems, such as trying to convince strangers of their opinions in the comment section — something non-neurotic people recognise as a fruitless endeavour.
Neurotic people have amygdalas that are more reactive than those of the average population. The amygdala is a part of the brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response, which can cause a person to feel fear and anxiety. Given that their brains infuse negative events with more emotional resonance, neurotic people store more negative memories in their long-term memory.
Neurotic people are more likely to be hostile and hold negative sentiments about foreigners because they feel fear more easily and are more sensitive to potential threats in their environment.
During our caveman days, these traits made neurotic people useful members of the tribe, as they were more careful about threats to the tribe’s safety, such as being more sensitive to predators’ presence in the wild. In our cushy modern world, far from the hostility of living in the wild, their threat-detection systems react to other things: fear of foreigners, minorities, made-up internet drama, fake news, and so on.
Neurotics often have limited social interaction in real life, as they are significantly more at risk of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. Because of their negative personality, they struggle to make friends in real life. To compensate, they engage in more “social” interaction online, including developing parasocial relationships.
They also react more strongly to negative media and are more likely to engage with and pay attention to it. The algorithm then feeds them similar media because it does not discriminate between positive and negative engagement; it only cares about keeping the user active on the platform. Which, in turn, incentivises these media companies to create more negative news cycles to farm engagement.
Not all neurotic people are assholes, but most assholes are neurotic. These assholes have a disproportionate ability to spread negativity online compared with in real life. People who get kicked out of online communities switch between communities more often, increasing their exposure to more people — making the internet worse for other people who have to deal with these assholes.
In real life, assholes would be banned and blacklisted from communities or places, and it would be harder for them to make a new account and try to enter the same place, because you can’t change your face as easily as you can create a new online profile.
Reason 2: The react economy
The react economy describes a common phenomenon in which one creator makes a controversial video, other creators on the platform respond with hostile opinions to drive engagement and drama, and the original creator then has more material to make profit-earning videos by reacting to these reactors.
Creators do this by clipping one part of a video the original creator made, reacting to it while ignoring the broader context. This bait prompts the original creator to make a new video explaining that their controversial opinion has been taken out of context, and that, with context, their seemingly offensive opinion is actually sound and not that controversial.
The react economy relies on straw man arguments and the motte-and-bailey fallacy to remain sustainable. Firstly, reactors oversimplify and reword (strawman) the opinion they are reacting against to make it easier to create drama out of it. Then, they say something that seems radical and outrageous, an opinion they know can be clipped out of context (the bailey, or hard-to-defend position). After the drama unfolds, they make a “clarification video” explaining their position more nuance (the motte, or easy-to-defend position).
The cycle repeats indefinitely until fans get bored and views drop. In that case, the creators conveniently make peace, resolve the drama, and pretend they are all buddies now.
Engagement farming and rage bait are not only practised by YouTubers who make a living off Patreon; major media sites also employ people whose full-time job is to do so, including staff writers, magazine columnists, and journalists at reputable companies.
For example, on the eve of Pride Month this year, The New York Times published a viral article titled “Being Straight Is Great, Actually”. This headline seemed like an intentional rage bait (that worked) given the poor timing with the upcoming Pride Month and the attack on gay rights by the dominant political party in the US.
And I have not even got to the number of social media political commentators and public “intellectuals” whose entire income comes from creating drama online. Social media platforms love these types, as their priority is to maximise the time users spend online.
There is a direct financial incentive to promote a negative media ecosystem.
Reason 3: Dehumanisation and alienation
Just as people forget that celebrities are human with feelings like the rest of us, the lack of direct face-to-face contact in threads and forums doesn’t allow for neural mirroring and empathy, leading people to forget that the users they interact with have feelings and can be hurt by their words. You also can’t punch assholes through a screen.
Online, people present their opinions as “objective” without letting us see their personal context or situation (e.g. we can’t see that someone is being cruel because they grew up in an abusive family and communicating with abuse is the only way they know to express their emotions, or that they have mental disorders, etc.). Online, we only see one part of someone’s life; we don’t see them as complex people with often contradictory values.
I used to be one of these people, writing online and endorsing radical sex-negative feminist opinions, arguing that all heterosexual sex is a form of violence towards the female body because phallic penetration is a physical representation of colonisation and invasion. But people who read my opinions see these arguments framed in “objective” intellectualism and philosophy, without knowing that I hold this opinion very strongly because of my experience with SA and rape.
Furthermore, toxic things online, when said in real life, would be strongly socially rebuffed, publicly and in a very obvious, frontal way. The asshole will face direct consequences, and most will feel fear because they are physically threatened, not immune behind a screen.
For example, the creator iDubbbz used to be praised online for daring to say the N-word a lot as a white person, with his internet fans complimenting his bravery in being non-PC, but when he said the N-word out loud in person, the whole room gasped at him, and he was kicked out of the conference. He admitted in a video that this event made him feel ashamed for the first time in his life for saying the N-word, and he stopped saying it in his videos.
Additionally, due to online anonymity, many chronically online trolls and commentators are likely to be young kids posing as older people. I know this because I used to be one of them. I even had a romantic fling with a divorced dad on Facebook when I was 13 because he thought I was older.
Reason 4: Poor media literacy
Media literacy is a developed skill and a privilege. Whether online or offline, many people have poor media literacy. If you have high media literacy, you may take it for granted and assume that everyone must be as educated as you are, but this is not true. In many parts of the world, media literacy is not encouraged in the education system.
In 2026, there are 6 billion daily internet users (74% of the world population), and only 500–800 million adults worldwide hold a bachelor’s degree (6–10% of the world population). While I am not saying that holding a bachelor’s degree guarantees good media literacy, I am pointing out that the majority of the world is not privileged enough to access higher education.
When I moved from Indonesia to Australia, I had to take a media literacy class where the teacher gave us a bunch of news articles and told us to critically evaluate them, including identifying authorship biases, omissions, and conflicts of interest.
Many international students in the class performed this task at varying levels of ability, as some students from China face heavy internet censorship and are not taught to question authority. In Indonesia, critical thinking and media literacy are also low. Still, since I was a chronically online kid who consumed a lot of English content, I was able to do this activity using skills I took for granted.
Not to mention that poor media literacy is not exclusive to the developing world; the News Literacy Project reports that fewer than 20% of American teens can distinguish among news, ads, opinion, and entertainment.
Reason 5: Humans are deeply flawed (not just online)
People are complex and diverse; even those who grew up in the same town and with the same socioeconomic background can end up very different from one another.
We need to develop self-awareness and cultivate humility. Accept that people are profoundly flawed. Accept that your parents are flawed. Accept that you are flawed, and that feeling you are right does not guarantee that you are. This fact is something we have to accept, much like accepting that our parents, who seemed all-knowing and invincible as kids, are deeply flawed when we become mature enough to realise it.
We need to grow out of the infantile belief that our parents are perfect. This mentality leads to arrested psychological development (most people are stuck here to some extent).
We don’t have to like everyone, but we can learn to love them despite their flaws. Loving someone does not mean accepting or tolerating all their bad behaviour, but rather understanding that they are a complex human being with their own pains and personal histories, and that they are capable of change.
Because if there is hope for me, there is hope for everyone. If there is hope for anyone, there is hope for me.
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This post was previously published on An Injustice!
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