I got curious and read the paper and it's important to note that
- it focused fully and specifically on hostility during talks on political topics
- most of the data was based on self-reports (the users had to fill in questionnaires saying the scientific version of "yeah I had a talk about politics online and yeah I called that guy a stupid motherfucker for not agreeing with me") in US and Denmark groups
and basically what they found was "people who report themselves getting hostile during offline talks are usually also the people who report themselves being hostile during online conversations."
then they looked at their graphs saying "well people report political talks being more noticeably hostile online than offline, why is that" and tested a few theories (lack of empathy during online conversations*, selection bias with angry people being more likely to engage in such topics, and the lack of social cues creating a perception skew making a normal comment look hostile) but didn't find any strong evidence for any of those, so they just concluded "idk people just scroll through a lot of negative talks online, most of hostility they see seems to come from the interactions between strangers and not their own experience, so ofc there's more of it online since the convos stay up for everyone to see for years."
*I'm not sure they linked to a specific study, but they did list the theory of "people feel much less empathic towards other humans online compared to offline" as a well studied topic and a confirmed hypothesis though which I think is also important to mention here. Because, well, that does mean that people still can be bigger jerks online compared to offline, it's just way less straightforward than going through a magical girl transformation and becoming an asshole as soon as you log into your social media account.
Also this is fucking funny
Reading truly is hard
