Social Media: The New Nicotine.

[Brian Peacock]

Seen it. Have you seen the one about life-hacking your own flame thrower?

[JimC]

Those stupid spinners seem to be a craze at school at the moment...

[pErvinalia]

Here's something equally as fucking stupid.

[Alan B]

Jesus! Anything to keep humanity's attention away from our impending doom and lying manipulative politicians...

[Scot Dutchy]

What a fucking nerd.

[Tero]

Twitter disappearing, what's left? tik tok?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... d-killjoys

[Svartalf]

I've heard of a tweeterlike called mammoth or mastodon...

[Sean Hayden]

Nobody made you all lose your fucking minds and build lives in the Facebook Twitterverse...

[Joe]

Somebody recommended a social media site called Telegram, but it wanted me to download an app that looked a little clunky.

[Sean Hayden]

[Joe]

[Sean Hayden]

--I've got absurd down now

[Svartalf]

Like another series of memes say, it's fine.

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

Posting this for a friend.

It's not your fault if you're a jerk on Twitter

The design of the internet lets you harass and harm people without ever once interacting with them directly. Even if you're trying to defend them.

I’m used to comics breaking my heart; I’m a Wicked and Divine fan, after all. But I felt the particularly painful crack of an old fissure reopening as I read cartoonist Mallorie Udischas-Trojan’s “Piled On” at The Nib. It describes the pain of being harassed over a jokey comic she wrote in which a character shoplifts supplies from an art store. The 10th panel, depicting her own heartbreak at friends and allies joining the dogpile—“I … I really thought we were rooting for each other”—just about broke me. I’ve been there, and I have many friends and colleagues who’ve experienced their own versions of this sort of lateral abuse.

Many seem to imagine that a greater focus on personal responsibility can detoxify the internet; perhaps Udischas-Trojan’s progressive harassers, her erstwhile friends, were just bad people all along, surely? I myself promoted the idea of digital ethical education as part of the solution to problems like these. But the tragic reality is that our good intentions—in whichever direction they may run—are so easily twisted online, corrupted from their purpose due to forces beyond our control.

The internet is a distributed network where you can harass and harm people without ever once interacting with them directly. Your intent is irrelevant. Even, crucially, if it’s an attempt to defend the person being harassed.

In the end, online harassment campaigns twist questions of personal responsibility and virtue into strange shapes, often rendering them immaterial. A campaign needs individuals to participate, but, as with Agatha Christie’s murderers on the Orient Express, no one knows who in the crowd strikes the fatal blow....