> If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law.
Or equally likely-- there are a tiny fraction of bona fide users who act moderately anti-social on the net when granted anonymity, just as they would in real life.
It's just that forums with no little to no publishing friction allow those people to do 100x damage compared to what they could get away with in real life.
Add to that:
* corporate-sponsored trolls doing 1000x damage compared to real life
* nation-state trolls doing 10000x damage compared to real life
That's how you get that inimitable Reddit charm of watching an entire thread on geopolitics seem to change its hive mind as the mods manually strip out all the astroturf over the course of an hour.