Researchers in Denmark have conducted a study that shows that online assholes are also assholes offline.
This should surprise no one. In the real world, flesh and blood trolls are just as toxic as they are online.
The only difference is that online discussions make it easier to troll more, and larger, groups:
A new study published in the American Science Review found that that if you're an asshole troll online, there's a pretty good chance that you're the same way in the brick and mortar world. The researchers used representative surveys and behavioral studies from the U.S. and Denmark to try and figure out if it the novel and relatively new internet was somehow making normal human beings more hostile. But as the researchers point out on Twitter, they found no real evidence for that:
Surprisingly, we found no evidence for this hypothesis. Across four representative samples, we find remarkably high correlations between self-reports of online and offline political hostility. The people hateful on Twitter offend others in face-to-face conversations too. /5 pic.twitter.com/nrw6gU7Zr2
— Alexander Bor (@boralexander1) July 19, 2021
In short if you're a hostile person online, you're probably a hostile person offline. And while Facebook has a lot of obvious problems on a wide variety of fronts, it's not inherently responsible for somehow creating human dysfunction that already existed. The researchers told Engineering and Technology that online debates seem more hostile because the hostile players simply have a bigger bullhorn, and the resulting chaos they create has much broader visibility than it would in the offline world:
The short version: Trolls are trolls, and they troll, and they try to find a place that they want to troll as many people as possible.
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