The Cruelty of Crowds

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

In 2005, a young woman took her dog onto the Seoul metro where it promptly did its business. The owner refused to pick up after it. She was scolded by her fellow passengers. In an earlier age, 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 had caught the action on their cell phone and posted a picture of the dog owner to a popular website, soliciting others to ferret out her identity. Once identified, the young woman was subjected to so much shame and humiliation that she reportedly dropped out of university. The story caught the attention of the global media, became a meme, and was even turned into a 2021 Romanian film.

If it were just a one-off, then the story of “dog poop girl” would be just another strange digital-era fad that comes and goes, like flash mobs or the mannequin challenge.

Alas, the Internet has become like a malign magnifying glass that focuses the anger of anonymous crowds onto individuals. Today, the private information of those targeted—which, as in the cases of “dog poop girl,” Gamergate, and various “Karen” controversies, often turn out to be women— is broadcast across the Internet so that they can be “doxxed” with threatening letters and packages and even the dispatch of SWAT teams. Videos of negative interactions, which often involve confrontations across race, class, or gender, end up ruining reputations and lives.

Many of these cases have been scrutinized at great length. Less explored perhaps is the link between this on-line behavior and global politics. Fascist politicians once relied on shock troops to eliminate opponents and their supporters. Today, they are using social media for the same ends. The rise of these far-right figures cannot be understood without reference to the digital frenzy of their supporters.

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

Same hate, different media.

A Short History of Collective Cruelty

Let’s face it: it used to be worse.

When life was considerably harsher and more violent than it is today, cruelty was a more integral part of everyday experience. Stockades were essential tools for public shaming and punishment. Crowds once gathered to watch executions, even particularly gruesome displays like drawing and quartering. Picnickers brought their baskets and opera glasses to watch the first major battle of the Civil War. Lynchings, which often involved drawn-out torture, were also accompanied by food and festivity. The last U.S. public hanging attracted 20,000 people to Kentucky in 1936. Suffice it to say, they didn’t go there to protest the execution.

It’s not difficult to find examples of collective cruelty in today’s world. The ancient punishment of public stoning, for instance, continues in Iran, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mali, and elsewhere as a method to execute adulterers, murderers, and infidels. Here, too, crowds often gather to provide approving witness.

So, perhaps Internet “stonings,” with words substituting for “sticks and stones,” are a marginal improvement. But that’s cold comfort for the victims.

Consider again the case of South Korea where a rash of high-profile suicides were associated with some of the earliest examples of cyberbullying. Between 2000 and 2019, 40 celebrities committed suicide, with hateful messages and malicious comments on social media sites as a leading factor. After two more high-profile suicides in 2022—a male volleyball player upset over the rumor-mongering about his sexuality and a female influencer slandered on-line as a “man-hater”—150,000 South Koreans signed a petition calling for those responsible for the cyberbullying to be punished. In the United States, meanwhile, social media has fueled an increase in teenage suicide rates and prompted hundreds of lawsuits against platforms like Instagram for amplifying derogatory content.

All of that is tragic, to be sure. More consequential perhaps is the way that the cruelty of crowds, expressed digitally, is transforming modern politics.

Fanning the Flames

Integral to the rise of the MAGA movement in the United States—and to other far-right parties around the world—have been conspiracy theories like QAnon. 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 overtones.

Conspiracy theories certainly existed before the Internet. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic tract, facilitated the eruption of pogroms throughout Russia in the early twentieth century. However, even as it has provided an unprecedented opportunity to retrieve and verify information, the Internet has not just perpetuated any number of conspiracy theories but has also undermined any collective understanding of the truth. Everyone has their niche on-line, from beach volleyball players to collectors of Malaysian postage stamps. The truth, it seems, has also been divided up into myriad niches. Anti-vaxxers, flatworlders, election deniers, and those original Internet conspiracy hounds the 9-11 Truthers can all find a place on-line that reinforces their particular “truth.” There is no strength in this kind of diversity, only an epistemological vacuum.

The real-world implications of this assault on truth have been enormous. One of the most recent myths in the current U.S. election involves a false claim amplified by J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. On line, he supported the notion that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a town of around 60,000 people, have been eating other people’s pets.

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

The Republican mayor has also been besieged.

“There are threats against my family,” he told 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 watching your family.’ All these things that you never want to hear.”

Because they don’t have a lot of 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 the recent hurricanes, Custom and Border Protection officials for their work at the border, even jurors who voted to convict Trump in his New York trial.

But it’s the election itself that has attracted the greatest level of manipulation. The aggressive rhetoric is escalating on-line in such corners of the Internet as Telegram. According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism:

Much like in 2020, violent rhetoric related to election denialism has risen 317 percent over the course of October 2024. Posts made on Telegram include using election denialism to justify an apparent “inevitable civil war” and a call to “Shoot to kill any illegal voters.” Throughout the year, Proud Boys online accounts, whose leader and members helped orchestrate the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been calling for elected officials to be “arrested, tried for treason, and hanged,” and called for their supporters to “keep your rifles by your side.”

It’s not just 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 U.S. politicians pretend to be evenhanded—by suggesting that Russia and Iran somehow balance each other out by each backing a different candidate—the Kremlin has in fact been playing a much more significant role in exploiting dividing lines in the U.S. electorate and promoting greater polarization.

Long after its intervention in the 2016 election, Russia is still establishing hundreds of X accounts, multiple websites, and scads of video clips with various types of disinformation. For example, the Kremlin paid alt-right influencer Lauren Chen to publish Russia-friendly videos on her popular channel and, more significantly, funnel millions of dollars into the hands of even more prominent pro-Trump commentators. She is currently under federal indictment.

Future Fractiousness

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

But this is just tinkering at the margins. Digital companies must institute changes—or be forced to do so by government, public demand, or legal action. One option would be to ban anonymity so that individual malefactors can’t hide in the crowd. But the arguments against such a move are persuasive.

So, here are some other possible approaches.

First, the chief engineers of hatemongering and disinformation must be brought to account. We shouldn’t have to rely on the courts to bankrupt someone like Alex Jones, who was responsible for spreading so many malicious conspiracy theories. Free speech is a sacred right, but no one should be allowed to yell fire on the Internet when there’s no smoke or flames.

Second, distinguish between free speech and “free reach.” Sure, people can still say noxious things on the Internet. But algorithms should not promote hateful content. To achieve this, social media companies would have to make their algorithms transparent.

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

Okay, that takes care of the trolls. But what about the politicians who have weaponized the cruelty of crowds? Democratic mechanisms are supposed to weed out the worst offenders, but obviously that’s not working. Deplatforming is an excellent way of reducing their digital power; independent fact-checking can counter their most audacious lies.

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

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