anonymity allows people to be not very nice

Hiding behind keyboard is easy.

Why should people be nice online when there are no tangible consequences to them being evil?

It’s the result of the “bombastic” mix of false dichotomy, assumptions, and social media dynamics.

False dichotomy prevents you from noticing nuances, complexities, third sides, or gradations. Under a false dichotomy, there’s no such thing as “Alice and Bob are bad, but Alice is worse than Bob”; no, either they’re equally bad (thus both deserve to die), or one of them is good.

In the meantime, assumptions prevent you from handling uncertainties, as the person “fills the blanks” of the missing info with whatever crap supports their conclusion. For example you don’t know if Bob kills puppies or not, but you do know that he jaywalks, right? So you assume that he kills puppies too, thus deserving death.

I’m from the firm belief that people who consistent and egregiously engage in discourse showing both things are muppets causing harm to society, and deserve to be treated as such. (Note: “consistent and egregiously” are key words here. A brainfart or two is fine, as long as there’s at least the attempt of handling additional bits of info and/or complexity.)

Then there are the social media dynamics. I feel like a lot of users here already addressed them really well, but to keep it short: social media gives undue exposure to idiots doing the above due to anonymity, detachment from the situation, self-reinforcing loops (“circlejerks”), so goes on.

Life is cheap on the internet, because people feel far removed (and/or “above it”). Social media “engagement” algorithms divide and isolate people from each other.

(I think as far as Lemmy is concerned, it’s just spillover / remnant behaviors from that stuff. There’s no engagement algorithm here other than what we bring in ourselves.)

Here are a some studies on it from people a lot smarter than me. (Note these are more about general toxicity and hate speech and not zeroed in on your exact question, but they may be helpful).

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.744614/full

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/11547/10076

https://scholars.org/contribution/countering-online-toxicity-and-hate-speech

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-021-00787-4

This one looks at the “why” question from a political POV:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/11/pgad382/7405434?login=false

Relevant: https://www.xkcd.com/2071/

(please mentally adapt for Lemmy instead of Facebook)

We’ve been transitioning from a dignity culture to a victimhood/outrage culture for most of my adult life. The relevant one here is the outrage culture, where people are trying their damnedest to be the most outraged. Nothing shows that you are more are outraged by something than suggesting that someone should die for being in disagreement with you.

I’ve found that people on the internet generally have low empathy. If it’s not animal or child abuse, the responses are all over the place.

Why do conservatives believe gay, trans, black, brown, Liberals, and the disabled deserve to die?

Part of it is that purity tests are at an all time high. In large part because we are constantly inundated with Content to reinforce our world views (or the world view of the Influencer we glommed on to) constantly. So anything different is not just cognitive dissonance: it is an attack on our very core and a lie. So if someone does something we wouldn’t do? They are the evilest of evil people and are knowingly hurting whoever we care about.

But the other aspect? The internet is a great place to meet people with different life experiences. And in a lot of cases (particularly with certain politicians), we and the people we love have been directly harmed by them. All that steven universe bullshit about needing to love everyone and always finding the good goes out the window when you are increasingly watching organizations try to murder you for embracing who you are and to enslave people and turn them into breeding stock.

And the last aspect is that lemmy has a really bad infestation of tankies. Tankies who, useful idiots or intentional, tend to actively argue for destabilizing The West and increasing conflicts. So advocating for terrorism and murder helps with that.

Because it’s a bit of an echo chamber and people get too involved in stuff with anonymity. You will find this sort of social behaviour all over the internet and from any “camp”. It’s just bad people.

Most people are led by emotions rather than cold and analytical reasoning. I believe everyone has the capability to think objectively but that capability gets clouded when ever they’re taken capture by strong emotions. That’s why they can reasonably consider an abstract but difficult trolley problem but then lose their minds when Elon says something stupid on Twitter.

I want to believe that the majority of people around me would infact not want to cast death sentences haphazardly like that but rather they’re just expressing how they feel. It’s a way to signal to the group. “Elon is a nazi and deserves to die” roughly tanslates to “boo Elon”

He who is without sin can cast the first stone.

It’s a psychological consequence of polarization, which occurs when you have too many people in a social group agreeing with each other.

Groupthink elevates extreme opinions.

Along with other things said here, people tend to “forget” that there’s a real person on the other end.

I vaguely recall Nicholas Christakis talking about a study they made, where they created a bot which would simply remind people of the fact that there’s a real person on the other end, and they found that it would help. (That study was done in some university platform and is centuries old in internet time, though. I think he spoke about it about 6 years ago on podcast with Sam Harris.)

They are children, or act like them.

Jumping to absolutes is generally the wrong move.

This is human nature. It’s the same reason you had 20 year olds sucker punching 70 year old asian women during lockdown. Cowardice and a need to lash out.