Net Negativity: Thinking About Online Brutality and Ways to Fix It

Online Abusers or Self-Identified Heroes?

The spread of abusive online behavior is a growing concern. One particularly recent example occurred at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when doctors advocating for public countermeasures and vaccinations faced harsh abuse on social media. The attacks did not focus solely on the content of their messages, either, as replies ranged from insults on their appearance to death threats.

Professors like Kutsuna Satoshi of Osaka University and Oka Hideaki of Saitama Medical University offered valuable information about the viral threat online, despite being met with a torrent of appalling abuse. They eventually filed a request for disclosure with the courts to discover who was sending the comments. The request was granted, and some of the offenders were identified and paid out-of-court settlements in compensation.

However, there are still plenty of social media accounts spreading conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines or claiming that the pandemic was a hoax, so that attempt at making an example of those offenders in court was clearly not effective. Why is it that online abuse continues unabated, despite its demonstrated illegality and condemnation from society at large?

The people perpetrating this abuse do not accept the view that they are “cruel abusers.” On the contrary, they identify themselves as heroes on the side of righteousness, and think it is their duty to bring down the hammer of justice on those who work against society. To them, “Doctors who advocate deadly vaccines and cause social unrest and panic with their warnings about COVID-19” are clear targets.

In other words, they seek “justice.” That is the reason calls to “end abuse” do not reach them. Their actions are based on a righteous indignation at an unjust society, so they think criticism simply doesn’t apply to them.

“Sweeter Than Dripping Honey”

That alone, though, is not enough to explain the vast waves of online abuse sweeping modern society. For that, we must look to the fact that resentment and anger are essential human emotions. In Homer’s ancient Greek epic, The Iliad, he writes of the emotion of anger, describing it as something “sweeter than dripping honey” that “fills people’s chests and blinds like smoke.” It seems that anger had already become an important theme in popular entertainment 2,800 years ago.

Japanese people believe themselves to be a harmonious, peaceful people who are slow to express emotions like anger. When the playwright Mitani Kōki adapted the famous 1957 American film 12 Angry Men for the Japanese market in 1991, he retitled it 12 nin no yasashii Nihonjin (The Gentle Twelve, or literally “12 Nice Japanese People”). It depicted what would happen if Japan had the jury system and posited that Japanese hearts were too kind and indecisive to come to a harsh verdict.

And yet, when Japan adopted the lay judge system in 2009, it soon became clear that was pure fantasy. A clear trend appeared where penalties set by the lay judges were far more severe than those set by professional judges, even exceeding the sentences requested by prosecutors. The vaunted Japanese kindheartedness and indecisiveness hid a secret streak of cruelty toward others.

The adoption of social media has made it easier to spread information, which may have brought that hidden cruelty to the surface. It is important to remember, though, that it is not just Japan that is seeing this continuing plague of online abuse. The phenomenon is a global one, so we must look beyond just national character to find another source.

Reality TV Sparks a Social Media Onslaught

One more incident I would note is that of professional wrestler Kimura Hana, who committed suicide in 2020, at the age of 22. She had been appearing on the Fuji Television reality series Terrace House, but during the series run, she became the target of harsh internet abuse related to her behavior on the show. It is believed that led to her death.

Terrace House followed a structure that has recently become common in Japan. The primary content is film edited from footage taken in a shared house filled with young men and women, focusing on their romantic relations. A secondary element features popular television personalities watching the content in the studio and commenting on it in a feed broadcast alongside the primary content.

The main footage usually features people from outside the entertainment industry or young people who have yet to make a name for themselves, but the secondary commentary from famous personalities is often quite aggressive, with common tones of direct criticism and ridicule. For one scene where a young man and woman go to dinner together, the personalities made comments about the woman like, “She’s used to other people paying,” or “She’s like a bar hostess.” Kimura, who was in the house as part of the primary content, was targeted by similar thoughtless commentary, and it seems likely that led to an escalation of the abuse she received online.

This pattern of insults by television personalities, inciting internet abuse, is influenced by the modern flood of information we all live with. With the coming of the internet age, the sheer volume of available content has skyrocketed, and the ways we receive and consume it have changed. The “savoring” consumption style of sticking to one movie, book, or piece of music and enjoying it thoroughly has shifted to the “instantaneous” style of moving from one media format to the next, like flicking restlessly through TV channels. Audience comprehension for any particular work has, as a result, grown shallower. To combat that, the composition of adding commentary elements to TV programs, like in Terrace House, has become more widespread. You could call it a style ideally suited to an age when media is consumed at blinding speed. At the same time, though, it seems to have created a problem where narratives acted out by the primary players have been stripped of all room for interpretation in favor of one way of understanding, fed directly to the audience by celebrity commenters, as Kimura’s tragic death helped expose.

Shortcomings Revealed

That structure is not only used in television. It has come to fit the online flow of information in general. In my 2011 book, Kyurēshon no jidai (The Age of Curation), I said that we need a new system for this time of information overload, one of “curation” that gathers massive amounts of media information, organizes it, and offers new value to people.

That idea has not become invalid, but in the last decade or more, I have come to see where my theory of curation comes up short. Namely, when a curator (an online sharer of selected information) puts a negative spin on the information being delivered, along the lines of “this person is bad and it’s fine to attack him or her,” it directly produces negative interpretations of the situation, prompting slander and other online brutality.

On text-based social media like X (formerly Twitter), the anonymity of the posters makes it easier to spread abuse. The nature of text makes it easier to say terrible things that you would never say to someone’s face. And on X, in particular, the repost function allows for information to be disseminated, along with negative interpretations, at shocking speed.

Can the Abuse Be Stopped?

It is difficult to stem abuse on social media as it exists today. As long as it remains out of the question to remove social media altogether from the internet, the only foreseeable solution is to wait for new systems to appear that can make up for the current shortcomings, with a structure that prevents ill will from surfacing and spreading.

Evan as we benefit from the conveniences of the internet, we suffer from the uncontrollable violence it also enables. Looking back on history, though, we can see that humanity has repeatedly been buffeted by new technology, then over time come to grips with it. Eventually, it helps us thrive.

We have to hope the same will prove true of information technology. It has been 30 years since the internet first touched society. Social media has a history of 20 years. It will likely take some time to get it under control, but I am sure that we will find solutions to the problems.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner image © Pixta.)