Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human goodness as well as darkness. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. The people formerly known as the audience used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same coarse "straight talk" as our current president-elect.
[...] As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That's helped blow the lid off society's pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don't even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.
Freedom of speech is only for approved narratives. Miss America explained it best in Bananas.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 28 2016, @12:01PM
Sorry, neither my left nor my right Alt key shows any sign of what people frequently assign to them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:31PM
"Alt-right" = Fascist
"Left", "Leftist", "Alt-left", etc = everyone who isn't a fascist
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:59PM
"Alt-right" = Fascist
"Left", "Leftist", "Alt-left", etc = everyone who isn't a fascist
Not being a fascist doesn't mean that I'm going to have anything to do with far-left nonsense. Always acting like there is no middle makes you as bad as the far right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:35PM
Fascism is a synonym for collectivism. The correct usage of the term [wikipedia.org] would include the judicial system, liberal media and so called anti-fascist groups. Kindly forgive my employ of individual liberty to correct your assertions: