You've read only the headline, but you already hold an extreme opinion. Hurry, it's time for a nasty comment! Let the hating begin!
You've surely found yourself on the other, less pleasant side of this. You calmly and sincerely post your opinion about something on social media, and suddenly things turn ugly underneath. You've hit a sore spot, you've said what you think… And then, with all its sweeping force, His Majesty Hate breaks loose—the lord of social media as we know it today. The first rude reply is followed by one in the opposite direction, and things quickly get nasty. What's more, it's obvious that most people haven't even bothered to read what you're saying. It all happens on general principle.
But where did all this aggression come from? Why must we answer rudely, even when we simply disagree with the person behind the other profile? Do we really have to lose every friend who thinks we're wrong about one of the burning issues of the day?
These are some of the big questions that keep me collecting Digital Stories, whatever happens in the comments below. I often discuss them with my interview guests, who have an interesting perspective on the subject. Over more than a year, a great many thoughtful answers have piled up, and they turned out to be far richer than anything else I've read about hate as a phenomenon.
To Love and Hate Fiercely
Social networks used to be a wonderful way to chat with friends and leave a heart on a picture of a kitten. Today they're a powder keg, and every new wave of global topics brings yet another dividing line that drives us into the trenches. Especially if we take a hard stance on the fashionable issue of the moment—however well argued it may be—the rudeness starts quickly, and then come the reports.
“Friends”—that's what the social network still calls them, and it's absurd. More and more often we surround ourselves there with people bound to us by shared outrage. And even hatred.
How did we travel this road? How did the battle to show different points of view suddenly turn into fanatical certainty in our own opinion?
On the Escalator of Emotions
The mid-2010s. Myanmar, formerly Burma, is a poor, backward country that hasn't been lucky with its leaders. Gradually, though, technology reaches it too. Within a few years, almost every one of its 50 million inhabitants acquires a mobile phone. And, by decision of the local mobile operators, with Facebook preinstalled.
People there lack the technological culture that we, for all our faults, have built up over the past decades. So every post very quickly becomes a marvel and an unconditional truth.
As a result, almost all Facebook communication in Myanmar soon funnels in one direction. The discussions turn against the Rohingya ethnic minority. The people of Myanmar are Buddhists, their religion supposedly peaceful, and yet over the following years a bloody and utterly groundless vendetta erupts. Because of fake news and online aggression, many members of the minority are killed.
In the years that follow, this case becomes a textbook example. Because of what happened to the Rohingya, the company now called Meta is forced to write explanations and analyses and to promise that it has changed its algorithm for good and will watch for reports of aggression.
A Social Safety Valve
Glory be to Zuckerberg, here in Bulgaria we haven't started killing each other yet, except verbally. But in words we're so bloodthirsty and expressive that even the calmest post can turn into an arena of mortal insults. A group created to discuss professional topics alternates silly memes and third-grade jokes with vicious arguments.
Why on earth do we still log in to read all this? Here is one possible answer. Because what triggers the strongest emotions is precisely total agreement or complete rejection.
Yes, it's a fact that social media is a kind of social safety valve through which people let off accumulated pressure. Well, a lovely valve… that often smells rather unpleasant. To smash, to tear apart, to approach any problem whatsoever from the standpoint of absolute truth.
Of course, the first big step that brought us here is the filter bubble.
Little Balloon, Fly Away
As Prof. Julita Vasileva notes, when people gather in a group of the like-minded, they radicalize one another. “From the inside, it looks as if the whole world agrees with the group's point of view. Group dynamics kick in. To stand out or build authority, a person has to express ever more ‘orthodox’ views, all the way to the extreme. In this struggle for reputation, people voice increasingly radical ideas, and that leads to complete fragmentation, to new subgroups splitting off, little ‘bubbles’ of dissidents. In the end nobody agrees with anybody, and universal hatred and schism set in.”
These social processes are normal; they happen in the real world too. With religions, for instance. “Every religious community, once it grows large enough, at some point swarms into sects and branches,” says Prof. Vasileva. “By then there are people looking for a way to rise in the hierarchy and build a reputation, but they can't do it within the group's rules.”
Hate will be hate…
“You can see the same processes in computer science, for example, which is growing very fast,” she adds. “Originally breakaways from mathematics and electrical engineering, there are now more than 1,000 subdisciplines with different forums and methods that don't talk to one another…. In virtual space all processes accelerate and can be observed within ten years or so.”
“Besides, filter bubbles make us lazy. It's easier not to think and to read things you agree with. Disagreement creates ‘cognitive dissonance.’ It's uncomfortable, it pricks… and you're forced to think in order to get rid of it by explaining it to yourself. That's how you learn new things and change your worldview,” Prof. Vasileva says.
Brawls and Balkan Music
Sometimes hate can even be… useful. As Hari Haralambiev says, the only time he's pleased is when the usual cataclysm we're talking about whirls up under one of his posts, because it's a sign that he has reached more people.
On the other hand, it's the loudest who get seen first. Most users who like what's written in a status or an article will simply read it and rarely chime in to praise it. Aggression and disagreement, meanwhile, are far more likely to provoke you into speaking up.
“People who communicate well usually don't hate. They'll silently see the link, read the article, and some of them will like it. But there's no way for them to find out about it unless you find the right channel,” he says.
It's like schools in gangster neighborhoods. The bullies, who supposedly have the most authority, are the ones you spot from a mile away.
Look Me in the Eye
One of the preconditions for this phenomenon is surely the very foundation of online communication, which simply isn't face to face. “It's much easier, when you're not standing in front of someone, to tell them something you'd otherwise be embarrassed to say,” says digital marketing specialist Vassilena Valchanova.
“Even in terms of emotion and empathy, you don't immediately see the reaction your words provoke. The link between what you do as a verbal action and the result is much more broken. And we are, more or less, social conformists. We evolved to get along with those around us, to build larger societies.”
Because of the environment itself, we sometimes tend to exaggerate and stir up a storm where there isn't one. “It's happened to me to read a comment that sounds like a very sharp attack. And after I sit for 10 minutes, come back and try to look at it a bit more objectively, the person actually hasn't said anything terrible,” she says. “But when someone starts criticizing you, you don't know how, with what intonation, they would say it. Something gets lost in translation. And since we generally know that people online are much more negative, we're far more likely to interpret their words that way.”
Little Lion Cubs Online
In recent years, compared with the old forums, we've increasingly joined online conversations under our real names and with our real photos. Still, one more factor we shouldn't overlook is the sense of anonymity on the web.
As one of the first guests of Digital Stories, Svetlin Nakov, puts it, “online, a person feels anonymous. If you went up to someone you'd tell on the internet, ‘You're a complete idiot,’ and looked them in the eye, I don't think you'd have the guts. Not so much because they might hit you back, but simply because people don't behave that way in person. Online you have a certain sense of anonymity, of safety behind the screen. That's the law of nature. If animals had the internet, the little lion cubs would strut around in front of the big lions and tell them they're morons.”
Conflict Drives Action
“We usually say online the things that are hard for us to say in person,” says actress Iva Todorova. “We enter a pseudo-conflict instead of a delightful real one. Communication becomes cold, flat. Koko Azaryan, the legendary Bulgarian theater director, taught us that conflict drives action. In that sense, communication on the web doesn't drive action; there are no preconditions for it.”
“We can't call hate a conflict,” she adds. “Because there's no opponent. Hate is locked between the user and the computer; it's not open to discussion. It's a monologue form that the online world created, and it fooled many people into thinking it's a dialogue or an argument. There's no such thing! Hate is for cowards, and cowards are people who don't stand behind the truth, behind their actions. Because haters don't perform an action in the analog sense of the word.”
Self-Totalitarianized
The writer Mihail Kunchev has quite an apt name for the phenomenon. “Our parents dreamed of having a voice, and their children freak out when someone doesn't share their opinion. We've self-totalitarianized.”
In his view, online radicalization resembles the religious kind. “I came across a very interesting book about the rise of the Islamic State, and it talked about self-radicalization. People who never imagined they'd hurt a fly, because someone constantly mocked and harassed them for being Muslim, self-radicalize and become terrorists, to the astonishment of even their closest family.”
“The same thing is happening right now,” he says. “One group of people constantly mocks your posts. They explain there's no coronavirus, that vaccines are poison. Another group rejoices that the first will die without vaccines. And everyone is amused that someone who doesn't share their opinion will suffer. Right? Serves them right! I'm not taking sides, but I can see there's very heavy propaganda that involves humiliating and ridiculing people who don't share ‘our’ opinion. The human in us is dying, because Facebook shows us that we can calmly and with impunity be disgusting to anyone, and it even starts to give us pleasure.”
Ban, Ban, Ban
How does Facebook fight the problem? Like putting out a fire with bombs. Its measures are ineffective, and the battle turns into a witch hunt.
According to Vihren Georgiev, the creator of “People of Sofia,” the solution is for people and page administrators to monitor the conversation. And not to hesitate to delete and ban.
“There are ‘Delete’ and ‘Ban’ buttons. I don't even wait,” he says. “It's a big problem; an awful lot of pages don't read their hate, nobody cleans it up. Freedom of speech? No, that's not it. Everyone has their own wall to share their opinion on as much as they like, nobody's stopping them. But to go somewhere else to spit and insult—where's the sense in that?”
In 2020, over three months, 22.5 million Facebook posts were removed for hate speech, four times as many as a year earlier. But you know very well from personal experience that this by no means always works.
I Hate You, I Love You
Blocking and banning, or is there another option? Who, then, can pull us out of this—the algorithms? But they depend mostly on what's expected of them. And since their goal is to hold our attention, we can hardly count on them to fight hate; quite the opposite.
Another possible solution, of course, is escape. Perhaps it's hate, more than anything, that pushes people toward the next social networks. Places like LinkedIn are certainly a way to discuss important topics with much cooler emotions. And ones like TikTok are a way to escape the burning issues of the day altogether.
An interesting touch is Musk's campaign to conquer Twitter. In practice, he says he'll let anyone say anything—he often likes to repeat that he's a free speech absolutist. Even if we set aside the fact that his own actions have often contradicted this… won't all of it help this network become even more overrun by hate?
At Home Among Strangers
Social networks are unlikely to change seriously in the near future in a way that would save us from the weight of hate.
So we're left asking who will save us: some of the pioneers of the tech world, who know very well why we shouldn't waste our time on this kind of communication? Or perhaps salvation lies with… Baron Munchausen, who pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair, or in the hands of the drowning themselves?
“If I lose my temper tomorrow, will it be because of technology? No, it will be because of my own personal inability to be good,” says Father Nikolay Georgiev. “Nuances get lost even without technology. The Bible says: ‘A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things.’ If we bring forth the good we have within us, we'll always speak the same language. In the realm of goodness there's no disagreement, and even if there is, it's only about the definition. About whom to help and with what, not whether and why.”
Still, social networks are an irreplaceable source of information and points of view for all of us. A chance to reach people with what you do, whatever it may be.
Of course, at the same time they demand a digital version of the mandatory social hygiene we used against the coronavirus. The right distance, and always staying on our guard the moment we sense hate. More often than not it isn't worth paying it too much attention, because the comments aren't aimed at us; they're one of the ugly online phenomena that somehow toughen us up. With the reminder that social networks are not a place for conversation between friends, nor for impartial news or meaningful discussion. Perhaps with a certain dose of digital minimalism. With an analog sobering-up—discussing the same topics outside the digital bubble, too.
And by thinking it over several times before we write something. By imagining we're saying it face to face to the person we're aiming it at. Or that they're saying it to us. Even online, it's worth trying to be human first, and ultras second. It's not all that hard…
