Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are unpacking
a topic that I think culturally we have miscategorized
for what, about two decades now? At least. We
tend to file cyberbullying way in this mental
drawer that's just labeled high school problems,
you know, right alongside prom drama and detention.
But looking at the stack of research we have
for today, that feels like a, I don't know, a
dangerous oversimplification. It really is. We're
looking at a phenomenon that has, I mean, It's
essentially industrialized harassment. It's weaponized
algorithms. It's created this massive legal gray
zone that affects everyone, right? From the 14
-year -old gamer all the way up to the 45 -year
-old doctor. Absolutely. It is definitely not
just a schoolyard issue anymore if it ever really
was. Right. I mean, when you look at the trajectory
from the early 2000s to now, we aren't just seeing
an increase in volume. We're seeing a fundamental
shift in the nature of the direction itself.
How so? Well, the iSafe Foundation data from
2015, which, you know, by Internet standards,
that's... practically ancient history, but it's
still our baseline. Sure. It showed that over
50 % of adolescents had been bullied online.
But the stat that always, always jumps out at
me is the parity. The parity? Yeah, that nearly
the same number had engaged in it. Wow. Which
suggests this isn't a simple case of like...
predators and prey. Exactly. It's more of an
ecosystem where the roles are fluid. You can
be the victim on Tuesday and the aggressor on
Wednesday. And that ubiquity, that fluidity makes
defining it actually pretty difficult. I know
in the legal world and in sociology, there's
a lot of friction between what constitutes just
being mean and what constitutes actual bullying.
That's the first hurdle, isn't it? Because if
you're going to legislate it or study it, you
have to know what it is. That's it. And if we
use the academic definition, cyberbullying requires
three very specific components. Aggression, repetition,
and a power imbalance. Okay, aggression and repetition
I get. But that third one, power imbalance, that
seems like it would get really tricky online.
It's the trickiest part. In a physical school
hallway, power is usually obvious. It's physical
size. It's... Social status, you know, popularity.
The captain of the football team versus the kid
from the AV club. A classic example. But online,
power is anonymity. Power is technical skill.
Power is having a bigger folder of screenshots
than the other person. The dynamics are completely
different. Right. And we have to distinguish
that from just a flame war, which I think a lot
of people confuse with bullying. 100%. If I get
into an argument with someone on ex -formally
Twitter and we're just, you know, trading insults,
that's conflict. It's toxic maybe, but it's peer
to peer. Yes. Both parties have a roughly equal
ability to disengage or to fight back. Bullying,
then, implies that the victim has lost the agency
to stop it. They're trapped. That's the core
of it. Conflict is a negotiation of power. Bullying
is the abuse of it. But, and this is a really
critical insight from the researcher Dana Boyd,
if you talk to teenagers, they almost never use
the word bullying. Oh, that's interesting. What
do they call it? They call it drama. To them,
bullying is a childish term. It's what happens
to little kids on the playground. They classify
almost everything we're talking about today as
drama. I found Boyd's analysis on this fascinating
because drama feels like such a minimizing word,
doesn't it? It does. It implies entertainment.
It implies that everyone involved is kind of
a willing participant in a performance for an
audience. And that is precisely the function
of the word. By calling it drama, teens reclaim
a sense of agency. It's a coping mechanism. So
it's not I'm a victim of abuse. It's I'm just
caught up in some drama. Exactly. It normalizes
the violence. It frames what is essentially psychological
warfare as just a feature of the social landscape,
like bad weather or a pop quiz. But that linguistic
shift, it doesn't change the clinical outcome,
right? The trauma response in the brain is the
same, regardless of whether you label it drama
or abuse. The brain doesn't care about the label.
The cortisol spike's just the same. So if drama
is the umbrella term they're using, we need to
look at the specific mechanics under that umbrella
because the toolkit for this has evolved so significantly.
Oh, massively. We aren't talking about mean emails
anymore. We're talking about tactics that can
destroy credit scores, physical safety, future
employability. I mean, the stakes are so much
higher. They really are. Let's start with the
escalation from just monitoring someone's profile
to what we call cyber stalking. Okay. Cyberstalking
is the bridge where digital harassment crosses
into physical danger. It's defined by the presence
of a credible threat. A credible threat of what?
Physical harm? Usually, yes. It's not just looking
at someone's Instagram stories. It's using that
location data to map their daily movements. It's
making false accusations to their employer or
their family. And crucially, it often involves
what's called proxy harassment. Proxy harassment.
Encouraging third parties to attack the victim
on your behalf. You stir up a mob. Which leads
us directly to doxing. I think most listeners
probably know the basic definition publishing
private info like an address or a phone number
online. Right. But the intent behind doxing is
what I want to drill into. It's rarely about
just revealing information for its own sake.
No, it's a call to arms. It's painting a target
on someone's back and then handing the coordinates
to an anonymous angry mob. It relies on the weaponization
of the crowd. The doxer doesn't want to show
up at your house. They want a hundred strangers
to show up at your house, or at least to call
it nonstop. And the catalysts for this can be
incredibly, incredibly trivial. We have the K
-pop war case study in the notes, which really
highlights the asymmetry of motivation versus
consequence. This story is wild. You have the
Blinks, who are fans of the group Blackpink,
and you have fans of the rival group Twice. These
are pop music fandoms. On the surface, yes. But
the infrastructure they have built is almost
paramilitary. The level of organization is staggering.
It is. In this specific case, there was a perceived
slight, a member of TWICE. allegedly disrespected
a member of Black Ink. Something tiny. Well,
they didn't bow correctly or something? Something
exactly like that. And in retaliation, the fans
didn't just tweet angry things. They identified
the owner of a popular Twice fan account, doxed
them, completely addressed phone number of family
members. Oh, my God. And the harassment was so
severe and so coordinated that the victim ended
up being hospitalized. From a discussion about
pop music to a hospital bed. That's the leap.
That is that drama. nuance again, outsiders might
see music fans arguing, but the mechanism is
a highly organized assault. And it often utilizes
another tactic. Yeah. Digital identity theft
or impersonation. This is another one that is
scaled up massively. Right. In the old days,
you might pretend to be someone in an AOL chat
room. Yeah, for an hour. Now, you can clone a
person's entire digital identity to systematically
destroy their reputation, create a fake social
media account that looks exactly like theirs,
and start posting hateful content. The Sony Music
Twitter hack is the classic large scale example
of how fragile our verification systems are.
It really is. The account gets compromised. Somebody
tweets hashtag RIBritney and for a solid what?
20, 30 minutes, a significant portion of the
world believes Britney Spears is dead. That's
reputation destruction at a global scale. But
bring that down to the micro level. A high school
student hacking a rival's Instagram account and
posting racist slurs or a fake confession to
a crime. And the screenshot lasts forever. Even
if you eventually prove you were hacked, that
image of you saying that horrible thing circulates
indefinitely. This is the permanence. That's
what makes it so lethal. It's never truly gone.
And that permanence is the leverage point. extortion.
This is arguably the most predatory tactic we
are seeing. It's just horrific. It's a distinct
criminal enterprise. The goal is to acquire intimate
images, either coerced from the victim or stolen,
and then use them as blackmail. For money, for
more images, for control. The WF West High School
case is the nightmare scenario here. We aren't
talking about a messy breakup where one person
shares a photo out of anger. No, not at all.
We are talking about a 16 -year -old boy running
a digital extortion ring from his bedroom. The
scale was industrial. One student, over 100 victims,
many of them his classmates, and he possessed
over 900 images and videos. 900? He wasn't just
getting back at an ex. He was systematically
collecting leverage on his entire peer group.
He used the threat of releasing these images
to control them, to get money from them, or sometimes
just to inflict pain. It effectively turns the
victim's own privacy into a hostage. And because
of the shame associated with it, the victims
are terrified to go to the police or to their
parents. It's the perfect crime in that sense.
It relies on silence. Which is why the perpetrator
got away with it for as long as he did. He understood
that the social cost for the victims of coming
forward was higher than the risk of him getting
caught until it wasn't. Until one person was
brave enough? I want to pivot now to a specific
historical moment that I think really defined
the viral era of bullying. We have to talk about
Ghislaine Raza, who is known to the entire internet
as the Star Wars kid. This is effectively patient
zero. If you want to understand the modern viral
ecosystem, the modern meme culture, you have
to understand what happened to Ghislaine Raza
in 2003. Right. And to set the scene, you have
to remember what 2003 was like. This is pre -YouTube,
pre -iPhone, pre -social media algorithms. There
was no for you page pushing content. Exactly.
The viral mechanism wasn't the algorithm. It
was peer to peer. It was file sharing services
like Kazaa and LimeWire. It was email chains.
For a video to hit. 900 million views in 2003,
which is the conservative estimate. It required
active human effort. People had to download a
clunky 20 megabyte WMV file. Oh, I remember those.
They had to save it to their hard drive. They
had to attach it to an email and send it to their
friends. It was a manual cascade of humiliation.
And the content itself was so innocent. He's
a ninth grader in Quebec. He's a little overweight.
And he's in a studio filming himself practicing
lightsaber moves with a golf ball retriever.
Because he's a fan of the Phantom Menace. That's
it. It's just a kid being a kid. And he didn't
upload it. He left the tape in a basement at
his school. This is the part of the story that
always gets me. That is the violation of consent
that often gets overlooked in the telling. Classmates
found the tape, they digitized it, and they unleashed
it on the Internet. without his knowledge or
permission. He didn't seek fame. He was drafted
into it. And the fallout was, it was catastrophic.
We aren't just talking about people online laughing
at a funny video. No, this was total life disruption.
He was doxxed before we really had a popular
word for it. People found his family's phone
number. They were calling his house, telling
him to admit suicide. Over a video of him playing
with a golf club. And the harassment bridged
the online -offline gap almost immediately. Students
at his own school were jumping onto tabletops
in the cafeteria to mock his moves right in front
of him. He became a global punchline. He was
parodied on South Park, on Arrested Development,
on pretty much every late night show. Imagine
being 15 years old and having global pop culture
turn against you for something you did in private.
He had to change schools. Eventually he had to
be homeschooled. He was diagnosed with severe
depression. It completely derailed his adolescence.
And the legal recourse at the time was so messy
because the laws just didn't exist yet, did they?
They didn't. His family ended up suing the families
of the classmates who uploaded the video for
around $250 ,000. They settled out of court.
But it highlighted this massive gap in the legal
system regarding the right to privacy for private
figures who become public spectacles against
their will. What's amazing is that Raza is an
adult now and he's done an incredible job reclaiming
his own narrative. He has. He went to law school
and he now works on issues related to digital
privacy and public humiliation, trying to help
others. He's trying to turn it around. But he
lost his entire adolescence to a meme. It's just
a stark reminder that the internet has a very,
very long memory, and it doesn't really do forgiveness.
It doesn't. Your worst moment can become your
permanent identity. That brings us to the where.
We've talked about what they do, but the platforms
themselves shape the behavior. You mentioned
earlier that anonymity is power. Nowhere is that
more true than in the world of online gaming.
Gaming is a unique vector for this. partly because
of the immersion. You are locked in a shared
virtual space with others for hours at a time.
It's intense. And the numbers back that up. Pew
Research notes that 16 % of harassment victims
say their most recent serious incident happened
inside a game. And the technical sophistication
of harassment in gaming is on another level.
I mean, look at the phenomenon of hate raids
on Twitch. This is where it gets really technical.
A hate raid isn't just a bunch of people deciding
to be mean in a chat. No, it's automation. It's
industrialized hate. Attackers use scripts to
deploy hundreds or even thousands of chatbots,
fake accounts, that all flood a streamer's chat
at the exact same moment. With what, just spam?
With racist slurs, death threats, doxing information.
The chat moves so fast that human moderators
can't possibly keep up. You can't delete it.
It forces the streamer to shut down their broadcast.
So it's a denial of service attack, but for a
person's speech? Using slurs as the weapon. It
effectively censors them through noise. And then
there's swatting, which we touched on before.
But I want to get into the mechanics of why this
is so hard to stop. You'd think the police would
know if a 911 call is fake. The problem is VoIP
voice over IP technology. Swatters use internet
-based calling services that can mask their real
location. They can spoof the number so it looks
to the 911 operator like the call is coming from
inside the victim's house. So the operator sees
a local number, hears a credible threat of a
hostage situation or a bomb. They have to take
it seriously. They have no choice. They have
to assume it's real and send a full tactical
response. And the consequences are lethal. The
2017 Wichita case. The death of Andrew Finch.
That case is the most tragic example of how virtual
actions can have devastating kinetic results
in the real world. And what was it over? A dispute
over a $1 .50 bet in a game of Call of Duty.
$1 .50? $1 .50. One player gets angry, tweets
a fake address to a third party daring them to
do something. The other player takes the bait,
calls in a fake hostage situation at that address.
But it wasn't the other player's address. No.
It was the address of Andrew Finch, a completely
innocent man who didn't even play the game. He
had nothing to do with it. The police surrounded
his house. He walked out onto his porch, confused,
and a police sniper shot and killed him. It's
manslaughter by proxy. It's just unbelievable.
And yet you have figures inside the gaming community
who will defend the toxicity. Yes, which is maybe
the most disturbing part. We have this quote
from Eris Bactanians, a well -known fighting
game coach, that really encapsulates this gatekeeper
mentality. It was a very revealing moment. He
argued on a live stream that sexual harassment
was part of the culture of the fighting game
community. His words. Part of the culture. He
said that removing it or policing it would destroy
the community's identity. It's an explicit defense
of abuse as a form of cultural heritage. The
argument is basically, we are tough, we are mean,
we are toxic, and if you can't handle it, get
out. It's the locker room talk defense. but digitized
and scaled up. It's about gatekeeping, about
keeping certain people, often women, out of the
space. And we see a different but maybe related
version of that hostility on dating apps. Dating
apps are designed for vulnerability, which is
what makes the abuse on them hit so much harder.
You're putting yourself out there trying to make
a connection. And the stats are pretty grim.
60 % of female users aged 18 to 34 report receiving
unsolicited sexual messages or images. And it's
not just women. 36 % of all users, men and women,
report experiencing some form of online abuse
on these apps. It creates a kind of a tax on
finding a partner. If you want to use these tools
to date in the modern world, you have to be willing
to endure a certain level of harassment. It's
an exclusion tax. It pushes people away, it increases
anxiety, and it makes people less willing to
be vulnerable in a space that requires vulnerability
to work. It's a fundamental design flaw, almost.
Speaking of design, I want to talk about Google
Bombs. This is a tactic that feels like dark
magic to the average user, but it's actually
just manipulating the basic plumbing of the search
engine. It's search engine optimization SEO,
but weaponized. It's a really clever and evil
manipulation of how Google's algorithm works.
How does it work? Well, Google's algorithm relies
heavily on something called anchor text. That's
the clickable words people use when they link
to a website. If thousands of websites link to
your personal blog using the words brilliant
scientist, Google's algorithm starts to assume
that you are, in fact, a brilliant scientist.
It sees the consensus. Exactly. So what bullies
do is they reverse it. They create link farms.
networks of fake websites or blogs, and they
all point to the victim's social media profile
or their business page. But they use negative
anchor text, words like criminal or liar or something
much worse. So it's not about truth. It's about
volume and consensus. It has nothing to do with
truth. It's an information cascade. They game
the PageRank system so that the first thing a
future employer or a new date or anyone sees
when they Google your name is this horrible lie
presented as the number one search result. It's
like digitally rewriting someone's resume against
their will. So we know the how, but let's get
into the who. Because the profile of the bully
isn't what those 1980s teen movies taught us,
is it? No, the Nelson from the Simpsons archetype.
The big, physically imposing, but not very bright
bully. That just doesn't apply here. So what
does the research say? Some of the research is
really counterintuitive. It indicates that cyber
victims are often the physically stronger or
socially dominant students in the offline world.
Wait, that flips the entire script. So the captain
of the football team is more likely to be the
target. In some contexts, yes, because online
bullying is the great equalizer. It's a form
of asymmetric warfare. Meaning what? Meaning
if I can't beat you in a fistfight or I can't
compete with your popularity in the hallway,
I can go online and absolutely destroy you because
online physical strength is irrelevant. Anonymity
is my strength. So it's the weapon of choice
for the physically weaker to attack the physically
stronger. Or the socially less powerful to attack
the socially powerful. It's a way to punch up
in a sense, but using these really destructive
tactics. And personality wise, are we seeing
signs of like sociopathy or is it just boredom
and cruelty? The profiles often show high levels
of anger. Low empathy and high impulsivity. But
the gender dynamics here are also really nuanced.
There's this common trope that bullying is a
boy thing. But the data says otherwise. The data
says that while boys might initiate physical
bullying earlier, by middle school, girls are
actually more likely to engage in cyberbullying
than boys are. More likely. Why? It seems to
align with evolutionary psychology theories regarding
indirect aggression. Right. The idea that stereotypically
boys are socialized for direct physical confrontation,
shoving, hitting, while girls are often socialized
for reputational management. Precisely. The weapons
are gossip, social exclusion. manipulation. The
Internet is the ultimate engine for indirect
aggression. It allows you to destroy someone's
reputation and social standing without ever having
to throw a punch. Which would explain stats like
the 2014 study we have here where 80 percent
of body shaming tweets were sent by women. It's
a brutal competitive arena for social standing.
And for women, historically, that competition
has often been indirect and focused on reputation
and appearance. The Internet just amplifies that.
There is one subcategory of the who that is just.
It's completely baffling, and that's digital
self -harm. This is often the hardest one for
parents and educators to understand or even believe
is real. So explain what it is. This is when
a teen creates an anonymous account online to
cyberbully themselves. They post hateful comments
on their own photos. They send themselves anonymous
threats. Why? Is it a cry for help? Is it some
kind of strategy? It can be several things. It's
often a very maladaptive coping mechanism. Sometimes
it's validation seeking. They post hate on their
own page, hoping their real friends will jump
into the comments and say, no, you're beautiful.
Ignore them. So it's a way to test their support
network. In a very risky way, yes. Other times
it's a direct manifestation of depression or
self -loathing. They're essentially externalizing
their own negative internal monologue. But from
the outside, it creates this statistical noise
that makes it very hard to track real bullying
incidents. Let's talk about the impact of all
of this. We touched on the young minds theory
in our prep notes. I think this is crucial for
understanding why teens don't just turn off the
phone. I think it's the most important concept.
The young minds theory is rooted in neurobiology.
The prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the
brain responsible for impulse control, for risk
assessment, for emotional regulation. It isn't
fully developed until a person is in their mid
-20s. So when an adult like us reads a mean comment
online, we have the biological hardware to process
it and say, OK, this is a troll in their mother's
basement. This doesn't matter. I'm moving on.
Right. We have a filter. We can compartmentalize.
We can separate our sense of self from the opinion
of an anonymous stranger. But a 14 -year -old
often lacks that separation. Their brain can't
do it as effectively. Their online identity and
their real -world identity are often completely
fused. So when they read a comment that says
you are worthless and should die, their brain
processes that. as absolute objective truth,
not as one person's nasty opinion. The abuse
bypasses the logic center and hits the emotional
core directly. It's a direct shot to the amygdala.
There is no filter. Which explains the direct
and tragic line to the term cyberbullicide. It's
a controversial term, but a necessary one to
describe suicide that has been influenced by
online aggression. We see these heartbreaking
cases like Megan Meyer, Ryan Halligan, or Rebecca
Ann Sedgwick, young people who were essentially
hounded to death online. Rebecca's case was particularly
awful. She was terrorized on apps like Ask .fm
and Kik. platforms that allowed for total anonymity,
the harassment was relentless and inescapable.
And that inescapability is the key difference
from, say, bullying in 1990. Back then, home
was a safe zone. You could close your front door
and leave the bully at school. Not anymore. The
bully's in your pocket. It's on your phone. You
wake up to new messages from them. You go to
sleep reading their threats. But the body never
gets a break. Never. The cortisol levels, the
primary stress hormone, they never drop. Your
body is in a permanent state of fight or flight,
which is why we see such severe... severe psychosomatic
symptoms, chronic stomach aches, bed wetting
in older kids, severe acne flare -ups, sleep
disorders. The body is screaming for help. And
this isn't just about kids, though. We are seeing
a significant chilling effect on professionals
who are targeted. Doctors, scientists, journalists.
Absolutely. Think about it. If you're a public
health expert and you post factual information
about vaccines and you get swarmed by thousands
of bots and death threats from anti -vaccine
activists. You might just decide it's not worth
it. You stop posting. We, the public, lose your
expertise. It's a form of soft censorship via
coordinated harassment. The public square becomes
dumber and more dangerous because the smart,
qualified people are too scared to enter it.
So with stakes this high, why is the law so bad
at fixing this? If I walked up to someone on
the street and screamed threats in their face,
I'd be arrested. Why is the Internet so often
a legal dead zone? In the U .S., it comes down
to the constant powerful friction between ensuring
safety and protecting the First Amendment. The
U .S. legal system is extremely protective of
speech, even speech that is vile and hateful.
Let's look at the People v. Marquand M case in
Albany County, New York. This felt like a pivotal
moment that went the wrong way for victims. It
was a textbook example of a legal doctrine called
void for vagueness. Albany County passed a law
trying to criminalize cyberbullying, but they
defined it as any communication intended to annoy,
harass, or alarm another person. And the problem
is that little word, annoy. Legally, annoy is
incredibly subjective and broad. If I post a
political opinion that you passionately disagree
with, I am, by definition, annoying you. So under
that law, I could be arrested for a political
tweet. Potentially, yes. And that's why the New
York Court of Appeals struck the law down. It
cast a net so wide that it inevitably caught
constitutionally protected speech. You generally
cannot legislate against being mean without also
infringing on the right to be opinionated. Unless
it crosses the line into what the courts call
true threats. Right. And that line is very specific.
I am going to kill you tomorrow at 4 p .m. at
your house is a prime. I hope you die in a fire
is, in most cases, legally protected speech.
That gap between a threat and a wish is where
the bullies live. Other countries handle this
very differently, though. The Philippines has
cyber libel laws. Very strict ones, yes. And
China has gone very aggressive recently. What
have they done? China's 2023 guidelines are interesting
because they sidestep the free speech debate.
They specifically target cyber violence and doxing.
But the enforcement mechanism is the platform
itself. So they punish the companies? They hold
the platforms like Weibo or TikTok. accountable
if they fail to moderate and remove the abusive
content. It forces the tech companies to be the
police. Whereas in the U .S., Section 230 of
the Communications Decency Act largely shields
platforms from liability for what their users
post. Exactly. It's a completely different philosophy.
Yeah. You see the EU carving out a kind of middle
ground, focusing heavily on things like the right
to be forgotten. Which is the ability to force
search engines to de -index that Google bomb
we talked about earlier. Yes, to clean up your
digital reputation. And they're also very strong
on employer accountability. If you're being billied
by a coworker on the company's Slack channel,
the company is held liable for not providing
a safe work environment. So if the law is slow
and clunky, what actually works? We see tech
solutions like that Back Off Bully app developed
by teens in Connecticut to report bullying anonymously.
But tech solutions feel like Band -Aids on a
gaping wound. The tech can be a useful tool,
but the solution has to be cultural. It comes
down to the bystander. The person who sees it
happening. We know from the research that 95
% of teens on social media have witnessed cruel
behavior online. 55 % say they witness it frequently.
But the vast majority do nothing. It's the classic
bystander effect. Someone else will fix it. That
or it's fear. Fear of becoming the next target
if they intervene. But the research is also clear
on this. When a bystander does intervene, even
just by posting a simple comment like, hey, this
isn't cool, the bullying stops within 10 seconds
in over half of all cases. 10 seconds. That's
incredible. The bully relies on the silence of
the audience. They are performing. When the audience
signals disapproval, the performance ends. It's
like you're removing the oxygen from the fire.
And the other piece of this is parents. The Canadian
study during the early days of COVID was so counterintuitive.
Screen time for kids went through the roof, but
bullying rates didn't spike. The researchers
speculated it was because parents were settling
home. They were in the same house. They were
looking over their kids' shoulders more often.
Active supervision is still the best parental
control software we have. So to try and wrap
this all up, what we really have is a behavioral
that is ancient and human. But it's being channeled
through tools that are inhumanly efficient and
permanent. That's a perfect summary. Cyberbullying
is the ancient human impulse to ostracize and
establish social hierarchies. But it's been amplified
by the speed, the anonymity, and the permanence
of the Internet. And as we leave the listeners
today, you had a final provocative thought for
us to mull over about the economy of bullying.
I think we need to ask ourselves a really hard
question. We look at things like hate raids on
Twitch or massive Twitter pylons and we call
it bullying. We call it harassment. But the algorithms
that run these platforms, they have a different
word for it. They call it engagement. Right.
High conflict equals high clicks. We have built
a digital economy that financially rewards conflict.
The angriest, meanest, most controversial posts
get the most views, the most shares, the most
ad revenue. So the question is, have we accidentally
built a society that actively incentivizes bullying?
And if 90 % of us just ignore it when we see
it, or if we click on the drama or share the
outrage, are we just the silent audience in the
stands applauding the gladiator match? That is
a haunting note to end on. Are we funding the
Coliseum with our own attention? Thank you for
walking us through the very dark side of the
web today. It's an important if difficult journey
to take. Thank you. Take care of your digital
selves out there, everyone. And maybe be the
bystander that speaks up. We'll see you in the
next Deep Dive.