Photo by Kaur Kristjan

Twenty years ago, when I first heard about the “dog poo girl,” I thought, “Well, that’s just South Korea.”

In 2005, a young woman took her dog into the Seoul subway, where she immediately went into business. The owner refused to pick up after him. She was scolded by her fellow passengers. In an earlier era, that would have been the end of it.

But this was the internet age, and South Koreans were among the most digitally connected people in the world. Someone captured the action on their cellphone and posted a photo of the dog’s owner on a popular website, asking others to find out its identity. Once identified, the young woman was subjected to so much shame and humiliation that she seems to have decreased from the university. The story attracted global media attention, it became a memeand was even turned into a Romanian movie 2021.

If it was just a one-off, then the “dog poo girl” story would be just another weird fad of the digital age that comes and goes, like flash mobs or dummy challenge.

Unfortunately, the internet has become like a malignant magnifying glass that focuses the rage of anonymous crowds on individuals. Today, the private information of those targeted – who, as in the “dog poo girl” cases, Gamergateand miscellaneous The “Karen” Controversies.often turn out to be women – it’s broadcast on the internet so they can be ‘doxxed’ with threatening letters and packets and even sending in SWAT teams. Videos of negative interactions, often involving confrontations between race, class or gender, end up destroying reputations and lives.

Many of these cases have been analyzed extensively. Perhaps less explored is the connection between this online behavior and global politics. Fascist politicians once relied on shock troops to eliminate their opponents and supporters. Today, they use social media for the same purposes. The rise of these far-right figures cannot be understood without reference to the digital frenzy of their supporters.

Father Coughlin had a radio. Leni Riefenstahl had film. Today, the far right has the internet.

Same hatred, different environments.

A Brief History of Collective Cruelty

Let’s face it: it used to be worse.

When life was considerably tougher and more violent than it is today, cruelty was a more integral part of everyday experience. Stockpiles were essential tools of public shaming and punishment. Crowds once gathered to watch executions, even particularly gruesome spectacles such as drawing and sprinkling. The picnickers brought their baskets and opera glasses to look the first major battle of the Civil War. There were also lynchings, often involving lengthy torture accompanied by food and festivity. The last public hanging in the US attracted 20,000 people in Kentucky in 1936. Suffice it to say, they didn’t go there to protest the execution.

It is not hard to find examples of collective cruelty in today’s world. The old punishment of public stoning, for example, continue in Iran, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mali and elsewhere as a method of executing adulterers, murderers and infidels. Here, too, crowds often gather to give an approving witness.

So perhaps Internet “stoning” with words to replace “sticks and stones” is a marginal improvement. But this is cold comfort for the victims.

Consider again the case of South Korea, where a number of high-profile suicides have been associated with some of the earliest examples of cyberbullying. Between 2000 and 2019, 40 stars he committed suicidewith hateful messages and malicious comments on social media sites as the main factor. After two more high-profile suicides in 2022 — a male volleyball player upset over rumors about his sexuality and a female influencer slandered online as a “man hater” — 150,000 South Koreans signed a petition calling for the punishment of those responsible for cyberbullying. In the United States, meanwhile, social media fed a rise in teen suicide rates and prompted hundreds of lawsuits against platforms like Instagram for amplifying derogatory content.

All of this is tragic, of course. Perhaps more important is how the cruelty of crowds, expressed digitally, is transforming modern politics.

Fanning the Flames

Conspiracy theories like QAnon have been integral to the rise of the MAGA movement in the United States—and to other far-right parties around the world. The far right’s obsession with “globalists” who supposedly support unlimited migration, undermine sovereignty and perpetuate “anti-family” doctrines goes hand in hand with a platform of nationalist renewal that has distinctly fascist undertones.

Conspiracy theories certainly existed before the Internet. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic treatise, FACILITIES outbreak of pogroms throughout Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. However, even as it provided an unprecedented opportunity to retrieve and verify information, the Internet has not only perpetuated a host of conspiracy theories, it has also undermined any collective understanding of the truth. Everyone has their niche online, from beach volleyball players to Malaysian postage stamp collectors. Truth, it seems, has also been divided into countless niches. Anti-vaxxers, flat-worlders, anti-choice naysayers, and those original Internet conspiracy watch 9-11 Truthers can all find a place online to reinforce their particular “truth.” There is no strength in this kind of diversity, only an epistemological vacuum.

The real-world implications of this assault on the truth were enormous. One of the most recent myths in the current US election involves a false claim amplified by JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate. Online, he supported the idea that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a city of about 60,000, ate other people’s pets.

Although this myth has been completely debunked — no less than the Republican mayor of Springfield— gained even more notoriety when he was quoted by Trump in his only debate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. The response from the anonymous crowd was beyond vitriol. After the one-two punch of Vance and Trump, Springfield had to declare a state of emergency. Neo-Nazi groups they converged on the city to build on hateful comments made by politicians. Bomb threats forced evacuation of schools.

The Republican mayor was also under siege.

“There are threats against my family,” he said The New York Times. “Emails, phone calls. They say they don’t want me around, I’m going to die, I’m a traitor, “We’re after your family.” All these things you never want to hear.”

Because they don’t have much political or media power to fight back, immigrants are a convenient target for the MAGA crowd. But the far right has waved a variety of red flags to incite violence: against FEMA and its response to recent hurricanescustoms and Border Protection officials for their work at the border, even the jurors who voted to convict Trump in his trial in New York.

But the election itself attracted the greatest level of manipulation. Aggressive rhetoric is ramping up online in such corners of the internet as Telegram. According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism:

As in 2020, violent rhetoric related to election denial increased by 317 percent during October 2024. Posts made on Telegram include using election denial to justify an apparent “inevitable civil war” and a call to “Shoot to kill any illegal voters”. .” Throughout the year, online accounts of the Proud Boys, whose leader and members helped orchestrate the January 6, 2021 insurrection, called for elected officials to be “arrested, tried for treason and hanged” and urged supporters to “keep gun next to you.”

It is not only domestic politicians who are fanning the flames of hatred in the United States. Other countries, too, are doing their best to push the crowd in certain directions. Although some American politicians claim to be fair — by suggesting that Russia and Iran are somehow balancing each other, each supporting a different candidate—the Kremlin has actually played a far greater role in exploiting fault lines in the American electorate and promoting greater polarization.

Long after its intervention in the 2016 election, Russia is still settling hundreds of X accounts, multiple websites and tons of videos with different types of misinformation. For example, the Kremlin paid alt-right influencer Lauren Chen to post Russia-friendly videos on her popular channel and, more significantly, funnel millions of dollars in the hands of even more prominent pro-Trump commentators. She is currently facing federal charges.

Fractionality of the future

South Koreans are calling on their government to punish those who participate in collective shaming exercises on the Internet. In the more contentious United States, the strategy is to make social media platforms pay for their role in spreading hate.

But this is just a change in the margins. Digital companies must make changes – or be forced to do so by government, public demand or legal action. One option would be to ban anonymity so that individual miscreants cannot hide in the crowd. But the arguments against such a move they are persuasive.

So here are some other possible approaches.

First, the chief engineers of hate and disinformation must be held to account. We should not rely on the courts bankrupt someone like Alex Joneswho was responsible for spreading so many malicious conspiracy theories. Freedom of speech is a sacred right, but no one should be allowed to shout fire on the internet when there is no smoke or flames.

Second, distinguish between freedom of speech and “free coverage”. Sure, people can still say hurtful things on the Internet. But algorithms should not promote hateful content. To achieve this, social media companies should make their algorithms transparent.

Third, stop treating message boards like the Wild West. There must be professional moderation with clear rules of conduct.

Okay, that takes care of the trolls. But what about the politicians who weaponized mob cruelty? Democratic mechanisms are supposed to weed out the worst offenders, but they obviously don’t work. Deplatforming is a great way to reduce their digital power; independent fact-checking can counter their most audacious lies.

But still, some politicians manage to waive these constraints. If they win power like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, they short-circuit democratic mechanisms to stay in office. At some point, the focus must shift from reducing cruelty to transforming the crowd itself. Minimizing the political polarization that supports mob cruelty will require both civic education and a reduction in economic polarization. Transforming the electorate into a civil and civic group that is not so easily divided between the haves and the have-nots is the only real solution. But it will be the hardest lift of all.