More than a decade ago, I started using the phrase “anti‑social media” to describe the strange behavioural shift that happens when people move from face‑to‑face conversation into the anonymous expanse of the internet. Revisiting those old posts now — some written as far back as 2011 — it’s striking how little has changed, and how much worse some of the underlying dynamics have become.
In one of the earliest pieces, I quoted Aeschylus: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” I added that “the ability to engage in intellectual civil discourse must rank right up there.” That observation came during the usage‑based billing debates, when Twitter was still relatively new and the idea of strangers hurling insults at one another online still felt novel. I wrote then that “adherence to truth and reasoned thinking is clearly not a prerequisite for publishing on Twitter,” a line that unfortunately reads today as understatement rather than critique.
The pattern was already visible. In 4 degrees of impersonal communications, I described how people speak differently depending on the medium: face‑to‑face, over the phone, in email, and finally on the web — the “fourth degree,” where the audience is global and the record is permanent. Paradoxically, the more public the forum, the less care people seem to take with their words. The anonymity of the medium becomes a shield, and sometimes a weapon.
That theme resurfaced again and again. In 2016, I wrote about being accused on Twitter of being “congenitally incapable of accurately representing ppl’s views,” a comment that arrived not after a heated argument but after a simple observation about a witness evading a question at a CRTC hearing. The exchange was a reminder that, as I put it then, “there are no referees on the field in Twitter; no red flags for unsportsmanlike conduct; no personal fouls.” The miracle of modern communications allows us to follow regulatory hearings from halfway around the world, but it also allows complete strangers to lob insults from behind cartoon avatars.
By 2021, the problem had grown more acute. A promoted tweet linking to a post on Mythbusting Canadian telecom generated thousands of views — and a torrent of replies, many of them anonymous, some of them antisemitic. I noted at the time that a surprising number of the trolls used cat images or Soviet‑era icons, as if the choice of avatar were itself a form of camouflage. “Hiding in their mom’s basement behind the safety of a shield of anonymity,” I wrote, “it seems too easy to spread hate and be downright anti‑social on some social media platforms.”
The behaviour wasn’t new, but the scale was. And the emotional toll was real. I wasn’t offering a solution then, and I’m not sure there is a simple one now. But there was value in naming the problem, in acknowledging that something about the architecture of online discourse encourages people to abandon the norms they would follow in any other setting.
One of the most enduring pieces in this thread is Being a mensch, written in 2018. It wasn’t about telecom or regulation at all. It was about decency — about treating people with respect, whether they are waiters, busboys, flight attendants, or strangers online. I wrote that “we led a generation to believe that the internet meant a democratization of interaction with everyone; some trolls help demonstrate the corollary: while they may have ability to have their message broadcast, people still retain the ability to ignore them.” That remains true, but it also feels insufficient in an era when online abuse has become a defining feature of public discourse.
The 2022 post Purveying hate on the public dime brought the issue into sharper focus. It wasn’t just about anonymous trolls anymore. It was about the real‑world consequences of lax enforcement and the uncomfortable fact that public funds were, in some cases, supporting individuals who had been suspended from platforms for their hateful conduct. The question I asked then — “Should the Government of Canada be funding purveyors of hate?” — feels even more relevant today as governments grapple with online safety legislation and the boundaries of free expression.
Looking back across these posts, a through‑line emerges. The technology has evolved, the platforms have changed, and the stakes have grown, but the core issue remains the same: an erosion of civility in digital spaces. Social media promised connection, democratization, and community. Too often, it has delivered the opposite. As Andy Rutledge wrote in his essay Anti‑social Media — a piece I’ve recommended for years — “much of the social media has become a venue for us to practice our most anti‑social behavior and exercise our basest motivations.” That line has aged remarkably well.
The question I asked in 2011 still lingers: Can we rise above anti‑social behaviour in social media or develop better filters to shut out the noise? Fifteen years later, I’m not sure we’re any closer to an answer. But the need for one has only grown.
What I do know is that the values we teach our kids — decency, respect, menschlichkeit — matter just as much online as they do offline. Perhaps more. The technology will continue to evolve. The platforms will come and go. But the responsibility to act like a mensch, even when no one is watching and even when the audience is global, remains unchanged.
Maybe that’s the real antidote to anti‑social media. Not new rules or new algorithms, but old‑fashioned decency, applied consistently, even in the fourth degree of communication.