Racist slurs and tirades against dead loved ones are a common sight for internet user Jay Bardell.
The New Zealander says the internet is a cesspit of nastiness, and the comment sections only seem to get worse with each passing year.
“You name it; it’s racist, it’s sexist, it’s things about your dead parents, things about dead family members,” he said.
“I feel if they were in front of you they wouldn’t do it, but if it’s just on screen they go whole hog.”
Psychopathic, sadistic traits
New research from the University of Queensland has found that so-called keyboard warriors are more likely to have latent psychopathic and sadistic traits.
The paper found a person’s “true self” was often more readily accessible online compared to offline.
Lead author Lewis Nitschinsk, a research officer at the university’s School of Psychology, studied more than 1,300 internet users across the world to see how internet anonymity affected their behaviour.
It looked at what people did online when they were anonymous compared with when they made themselves identifiable.
The study, published in Society for Personality and Social Psychology, found anonymous toxic trolls were more likely to be men than women, and more likely to be young than old.
Mr Nitschinsk said people fell on a continuum with low-trait psychopathy on one end and high-trait psychopathy on the other.
He found many people with high-trait psychopathy followed the norms of polite society in person and only expressed their psychopathy under cover of anonymity.
“When they’re anonymous, that’s when they have that freedom to express those darker parts of their personality,” he said.
“We found when people had a low sense of self, when they don’t really know who they are, that was the trait that most strongly came out as a predictor of seeking anonymity.
“People use anonymity to find out who they are and play around with it.”
He said Australia’s 2021 Online Safety Bill was the latest attempt to unmask anonymous troll accounts by forcing service providers to hand over user data.
Similar moves have been made in South Korea, Canada, and the UK in a bid to make service providers culpable for content deemed harmful.
Not all bad
However, Mr Nitschinsk said internet anonymity also provided an outlet for more positive forms of self-expression.
He said people with anxiety reported being able to more easily make like-minded friends when their anonymity was protected.
Additionally, he said it allowed freedom of political communication in countries where those conversations were severely punished.
“There are benefits of being anonymous — if you’re a minority group or LGBTQ you might seek a community that you don’t have in your offline space,” he said.
“People use anonymity as a tool to achieve different goals, and these goals can be both negative and positive depending on the person.”
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Tyler Fields is your internet guru, delving into the latest trends, developments, and issues shaping the online world. With a focus on internet culture, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies, Tyler keeps readers informed about the dynamic landscape of the internet and its impact on our digital lives.
