this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Politics
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This is why online moderation is important. I am all for freedom of speech, but it only takes one unhinged person to take venting as social license to do something extreme.
Venting online anger without some sort of moderation can quickly turn to: 'wait, I thought you guys were serious about mailing them bombs...'
Chose your words carefully when venting. Don't get caught up in echo chambers. Echo chambers are a really sneaky trap, since it's very easy to feel like you've found 'your people'. They are essentially online tribalism, and do not offer any insights outside of the main group's paradigm. Constant regurgitation of the same mantras (but with different contextual flair) just serves to entrench people in a given view, not expand the breadth of their thinking, and makes it seem like the only tool in the box is a hammer, when perhaps a a small screw driver would do the job.
I really think it should be assumed that a good number of those posting about making bombs (or any number of other acts of violence) are, indeed, trying to incite people to do such things. It's not all innocent venting being mistaken for calls to action.
Another approach is not to worry so much about the quantity of people, even an alone-echo chamber might be described as a public blog. Instead of focus on quantity, focus on quality. Hate, dehumanization, violence, evil, apathy towards suffering - all things to avoid. Mob Mentality is a real problem, the psychology of large crowds can be an even more dangerous thing.
When conformity enforcers overwhelm diversity generators, all of us are in trouble. Spartans--fundamentalists, militia groups, fascists, and ultra-nationalists--can freeze the machinery of collective mind. A shutdown of urban diversity devastates that exercise of collective acumen we call an economy. Christian Fundamentalism has been shown by the research of sociologists Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat to retard the learning of children raised within its grasp. Darnell and Sherkat sum up a common Fundamentalist attitude in the following words: "No schooling is better than secular schooling." Then there's the paralysis of thought which outright battle brings. When World War I erupted, Sigmund Freud was horrified by the sudden "narrow-mindedness shown by [even] the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments." Such closings of the mind may explain why authoritarians are prone to ignore it when their approaches flop. They often goose-step from one year to another rigidly glued to backfiring ways. - Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Chapter: The Kidnap of Mass Mind, Page 203-204, Howard Bloom