Why Nice People Are Jerks Online
By: Kristin Wong
Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Culture, Digital Life, Society

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Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

Spending an extended amount of time on the internet can feel like being in a bad relationship: You know it would be healthier to call it quits, but still, you can feel yourself being sucked in. And the longer you stay, the harder it becomes to recognize yourself.

Coming off a long, grueling election week in a long, grueling year, that feels truer now than it’s ever been: Our personas online, especially on social media, are often far from the people we want to be IRL. We pick political fights with relatives in the comments of a cousin’s Facebook post. Or we snark on strangers’ grammar mistakes. Or we disengage completely from the urgent problems around us, and pour our energy into crafting easy Twitter jokes as the world burns.

Of course, it’s true that every environment pulls a different self to the forefront. The person you are at the office, for example, is probably more professional than the sake-slinging, karaoke-crooning version of yourself that shows up at happy hour. But the internet has created a unique space where this effect is exaggerated, often in the worst ways — and eventually, our online personalities seep into our offline ones. As the pandemic forces us to live more of our lives online than we normally would, that separation is growing increasingly flimsy.

All that put-down-your-phone advice, in other words, isn’t just for your mental health; it’s for your soul. And to create an online voice that matches your true, actual voice, it helps to know exactly how the internet is warping the self you present to the digital universe.

How the internet makes norms disappear

In terms of behavioral cues, the internet is kind of like the Wild West. According to psychologist John Suler, the anonymity of the internet gives us a sense of distance from what we do and say, a phenomenon that Suler calls the “online disinhibition effect.”

On its own, this isn’t all bad — disinhibition makes it easier to open up and be vulnerable, which makes it easier to find supportive communities and connect with others. But as anyone who’s ever had a Twitter reply quickly spiral into a virtual snipefest can attest, disinhibition can also erode our sense of empathy, and with it, the norms that stop us from airing our nastier private thoughts.

Even seemingly neutral comments can be more fraught than we realize: When we communicate via text, we tend to weigh our own meaning and voice more heavily, whereas, with other types of interactions, we’re more likely to think about how others will receive the message. We also don’t have to think about the more subtle elements of conversation, like body language or tone, in online interactions.

It’s not just our lack of inhibitions that are to blame, though. Many online platforms encourage toxic behavior by design, or at least highly emotionally charged interactions. For example, recent research shows that online messages with moral and emotional words are more likely to get shared on social media — about 20% more likely for each additional word. In other words, the more likely your Tweet is to make people angry or upset, the more likely it is to be shared. And because toxic environments breed toxic behaviors, research shows, anyone can become a troll: All it takes is a bad mood and a hostile environment.

Bridging the gap between our online and offline selves

While it’s easy to think of our online behaviors as separate from our real-world identity, personality isn’t that simple. “Internet-related technologies have important psychological effects that manifest online and that may remain relevant offline, too, after the person has logged off,” the Stanford psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude, author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality, wrote in a 2017 study. However you are online, you don’t just shed that personality when you shut down Twitter or put away your phone. The problem isn’t just that people are jerks online; it’s that our online jerkiness can turn us into jerks in real life.

So how do we ensure that, like a bad relationship, the internet doesn’t turn us into the worst versions of ourselves? Sarah Johnson, a New York-based clinical therapist, suggests a rule of thumb. “Self-awareness and self-control are very important elements for your online or offline activities,” she says. As basic as it sounds, try limiting the time you spend interacting with others online, or at least come up for air frequently; the more time you spend inhabiting your offline self, the more power that version has.

As one concrete metric, “try to check your phone’s battery life at the end of the day,” Johnson says. “If you’re using it completely or need charging more than once, it probably means your online life is taking control of your life offline.”

Of course, we’ve all heard a version of this rule in some form or another. We know it’s harmful to spend so much time plugged in, yet we still do it. Maybe there’s no escaping the fact that, for better or worse, our online and offline environments aren’t really that separate. Who we are online is who we are offline, and most of us spend a lot of time online.

And maybe, if we fully absorb that fact, we can use it to our advantage. This is where the self-awareness Johnson mentioned comes in. The flood of anti-election-anxiety advice published over the past week has circled around one truth: We can only control what we can control. And when we bring awareness and intention in all our interactions, we can control who we are online and off. The only way to be who you want to be is to act that way. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.