I half-agree with this. The internet doesn't make a genuinely kind and empathetic person into a troll. But I think it does amplify certain bad little impulses that are latent in pretty much everybody -- the temptation of quick and cutting putdowns, mob and tribal mentality, lobbing rhetorical bombs then ignoring the consequences...
There is a qualitative difference between a back-and-forth on Twitter (or even HN) and a back-and-forth in real life. There's way more trust in good faith in the latter.
> These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.
I don't think so. A lot of people, and this is especially true with Twitter, get noxious because they found an audience there to "amuse" and entertain, which might amplify the temptation for "troll behavior", especially when that audience is of the same political/cultural leaning as the speaker. Social media inflate egos. Some people who might feel insecure in real life find a community there where they can feel like someone, not by doing something positive but by being mean and condescending to whom they deem their ennemy.
However social media didn't create these divisions, they just amplify them.
IMHO Twitter is a proof that even with real identities, people will engage in toxic behavior provided they feel supported by a large audience. Of all the social media I found Twitter to be the nastiest of all.
By contrast, aside from a few brigading, Reddit communities are often isolated, self contained and don't "leak". It takes a user to actively go on a sub to see its content, while Twitter is constantly pushing stuffs to its users, even the nastiest ones.
It's not Little Boy that created a runaway supercritical explosive nuclear reaction, it was uranium that created a runaway supercritical explosive nuclear reaction.
Except that that uranium had to be mined, refined, separated, shaped, and placed into a gun-type fission physics package.
The toxic people you mention existed before Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media). However they weren't manifesting the same effects as we're seeing now, for the most part, until Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media) came along.
It's not the components that have changed, but the relationships, vectors, and mediation between them.
We could, of course, note that there were earlier periods in which we saw similar types of situations evolve. And I could respond in turn that many of those instances were themselves the result of changes in the media landscape: AOL and Usenet, 24 hour cable television news, talk radio, FM radio, CB radio, handheld megaphones, Xerox machines, mimeographs, television (both terrestrial, cable, and satellite), radio, large-scale public address systems, high-speed printing presses, widespread literacy, population concentrations in cities, railroads, and more.
And from these: the 2003 Iraq War, the Gigritch "Contract on America", the Rwanda massacre, the Yugoslav civil war, the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, the 19760/70s Vietnam War protests, the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movements, McCarthyism, Father McCoughlan, Fascims and Nazism, the Russian Revolution, the Revolutions of 1840, the Chartist Movement, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.
Changing how a system receives, transmits, and processes information will fundamentally change that system itself.
I definitely have to disagree with you here. Human behaviour isn't really built in. There are obviously some natural behaviours in humans, but most human behaviour is a result of our surroundings.
When humans are in material need, they act in a way differently from when they aren't in material need. Nobody is surprised by that.
When humans are on reddit, they act differently from how they act on an old-style phpBB forum. No surprises there either.
The internet isn't toxic.
It's the people who are toxic.
These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.
Can anything be done to detoxify the people, or do we just treat them like spam and filter them out?
And what happens next when millions of rabid voices are suppressed?
The toxic people don't cease to exist, we just won't be able to see them as well.
Perhaps we'll find the social and political environment of 2022 to be much darker and more dangerous than 2018.