2015 – The Year Of Online Hatred!

From the News (BBC news): “A social networking CEO is subjected to racist attacks on her own website. A cartoonist’s life is trashed by trolls. Women get rape and death threats. There’s a case to be made that online, 2015 was a year of increased hate.

Those of us who watch social media for a living – or who are long-time users of sites like Facebook and Twitter – realize that nastiness has always been a part of life online. But over the course of the past year or so, it seemed to some of us at BBC Trending that the steady background beat of online anger gradually turned into a pounding 24-7 drumbeat of angst, impossible to ignore.

“So we set out to see if levels of hate speech did rise on social media this year. …

“A recent analysis by the think tank Demos found that on average around 480,000 racial slurs are tweeted every month. Compare that figure to just 10,000 three years ago. The researchers admit that the vast majority of those uses won’t amount to hate crimes. But the numbers are still significant.

“‘A 4800 per cent increase is astonishing – far greater than the general increase in tweets over that time,’ wrote Demos research director Carl Miller. …

“Other experts agree – something has definitely happened over the past year.

“‘2015 saw a greater normalisation of hate speech in society than in previous years,’ says Andre Oboler, chief executive of the Australia-based Online Hate Prevention Institute. ‘Where previously a person might make a vague negative allusion to race, religion, gender or sexuality, by the end of 2015 the comments on social media were blatant and overt.’ …

“Oboler warns that young people will be turned off from social networks if abuse continues to increase. …”

My Comment: There is no doubt the Internet will rise above the period of bullying and will throw the bullies out. But this could take more than a decade naturally because its hosted merchants sell sensationalism and hatred.

The salvation will come from another side, not from the individual and society, but from the side of nature that develops the ego within us, and the new ego will prevail over new middle-class hatred, so that arrogant and hateful reactions will stop being interesting, and all these scoops will disappear by themselves, meaning they won’t have a buyer.
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