Is the internet the problem, or are we?

By Sophia Brownsword

Most everyone that currently keeps up with pop culture and internet feuds knows about the recent pop singer Selena Gomez and socialite Hailey Bieber drama. If you do not, here is your own personal 411: Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber dated on and off throughout the 2010s, allegedly ending for good in 2018. Later on that same year, Justin then got married to Hailey Baldwin, niece of Alec Baldwin. Jump forward to late February of this year, a video of Hailey and Kylie Jenner supposedly making fun of Selena breaks the internet. Somewhere along the way, teams were chosen faster than in middle school gym class on capture-the-flag day, and the internet was divided over another extremely superficial conflict. And of course, the internet drama to the alleged death threat pipeline begins, ending with Gomez enacting a ceasefire on her Instagram story, saying Hailey Bieber is now receiving death threats, and that neither ever meant for this amount of hate to stem from this conflict. Now, if you are reading this and have absolutely no idea who the people I am referencing are, frankly, I am jealous of you. I wish I did not live online as much as I do, as much as I feel like I have to in order to keep updated on popular topics of conversation at school and among friends. The interesting thing about the internet these days is that we talk about how awful and negative it is for us almost as much as we use it. Sometimes, I do not necessarily think that the internet deserves the backlash that it receives. Its entire purpose was made to establish greater forms of communication and connection, and let us face it, entertainment. On their own, these founding principles stand as positive benefactors to our society, at least in the way they were intentioned to be used. And yet, there is still a dominant culture of toxic, negative and truthfully harmful behavior that exists on the internet. To me, this poses the question, is the internet the problem, or are we?

There are certain norms that the modern mass media has adopted surrounding language which contribute largely to our inability as a society to demand accountability from dominant groups. The media is much more likely to identify characteristics of perpetrators if they fall into marginalized groups than if they are part of the dominant group. The problem with this, other than the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes, is that when we do not call out dominant races, cultures, species, genders or other specific classifications, we defend these groups from culpability. I believe this idea relates to the internet toxicity discussion, because if we continue to blame the internet and spending time online as the reason that we send death threats to one another in comment sections then we fail to acknowledge the real perpetrators.

Sure, the internet makes it easier to send death threats to B-list celebrities that maintain large public platforms and uphold audience engagement, but the internet is not sending the death threats for us. We (not me, but you know, the collective “we” of media users) are the ones that are saying these things. The death threats, the direct messages telling people to kill themselves and all the other horrifying comments that people make are products of the posters, not of the platform. Celebrity-bashing existed a long time before social media and the resurgence of the internet, the only thing the internet adds is the ability to do all of this easier. While this fact does not make the internet innocent, I believe that it is time to call out those truly harboring this toxicity: internet users. The internet has existed since 1983. The first social media site was created in 1997. It is 2023 now, and internet toxicity has become a very prominent topic of discussion. If the internet and social media has existed for so long, then why are we only just now beginning to point out the supposed harm that this invention has on our lives?

I also personally disagree with the notion that if we just stop using the internet, we will remove this great cesspool of overarching negativity from our lives. It is like saying if you remove the outlet of the negativity, the existence of the negativity will no longer bother you. But just because you cannot see something does not mean it is not there. And maybe this strong opinion of mine is stemming from the fact that I am an avid internet user, but nonetheless, I still feel as if blaming the internet for these problems would be naive. Maybe, just maybe, the toxicity we blame the internet for has something more to do with the toxic world that we all are growing up in. The one where death is so normalized, where incidents of school shootings are skyrocketing and we used to watch kill counts of the global pandemic on the news every night, that now we feel it is okay to tell celebrities that make fun of other celeb- rities’ eyebrows on the internet to kill themselves (true story). Maybe growing up in this toxic world has made us all toxic. And even though this realization isa hopeful one, it is more important moving forward for us to acknowledge the part we play in the internet toxicity problem. The internet provides the weapon and the location, the candlestick and the observatory from Clue. But we hold all the cards. We hold the messages, the intentions, the harm and toxicity. It is not to say that as human beings and media consumers, we are all innately toxic, but rather to acknowledge that many of us find it easier in this modern world to adopt toxic behavior because we now have the ability to hide behind a screen. But we would have never blame the bluntness of the candlestick, or the seclusion of the observatory in Clue as the reason someone killed Professor Plum. So what is stopping us now, from blaming the true enablers of this toxic culture? I mean, we never guessed our own characters in the game of Clue. We always set up somebody else.

Now, this does not mean that one solution cannot be to just spend less time on the internet. This is a plausible, and easy to execute way to lessen some of the toxicity put out into the world as well as the amount that we see and say on a day to day basis. But this solution is not permanent. Fights will still break out in school bathrooms, harsh words will still be shared on fields during games, people will still hate each other. It is a harsh reality, but a reality nonetheless. The presence of the internet is just an amplifier of feelings that people already held for one another, it just adds fuel to a preexisting flames. The solution to our problem of a toxic internet culture cannot be just fixed by fixing the internet, we have to first fix ourselves.