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A survey carried out by BBC Sport shows that around a third of female athletes have suffered abuse on social networks, a situation that can only lead one to question the collective mental health of our society. The number of women who say they have been targeted by “threatening and scary” comments has doubled since the last survey, in 2015.
In response, the BBC says it is redoubling efforts to stamp out hate speech on its social media accounts, saying: “We have committed to blocking people bringing hate to our comments sections; we will report the most serious cases to the relevant authorities and we will work to make our accounts kind and respectful places.”
What will be the result of such a policy, implemented by a public media outlet in a country like the UK? What will happen to all those people who are blocked and whose only chance of continuing to spew hate, stupidity and gratuitous verbal violence on the web is to create another account? How many accounts will these trolls be able to create before they change their behavior?
Since the popularization of social networks around 2005, we have witnessed a truly worrying process: the normalization of hate speech. This has shown itself in many ways, from outrages that have prompted criminal investigations, to herds of idiots cheering on digital bullies mysteriously elevated to the category of heroes, along with comments of all kinds made by cowards who would never dare to behave in this way in real life, as well as situations where hate speech has been tolerated by social networks because it avoided using foul language, along with childish insults at the expense of someone else’s suffering.
This abnormal normalization questions, as I said initially, the mental health of our societies. The reasons for this behavior, which rarely happens in face-to-face social relations, can be explained in both psychological and physiological terms: the feeling of impunity sitting anonymously behind a screen generates, the disconnection of the interlocutor due to the absence of gestures that feed our orbitofrontal cortex, loss of empathy or the identity mechanisms associated with belonging to certain groups. In one way or another, this normalization has been taking place for some time in the opposite direction: gratuitous violence and hate speech on social networks already provokes violence that in many cases is extrapolated to phenomena that occur beyond them.
Normalizing the conversation is fundamental to the health of society, and even those, like the founders of Twitter, who initially declared themselves to be radical defenders of freedom of expression — “the free speech wing of the free speech party”, they said — confusing this concept with the right to insult, ridicule, persecute, harass or bully at will. It took a long time for Twitter to learn that lesson, and it only happened after much suffering and countless losses, but the signs now are that it’s trying to improve.
It makes perfect sense for a social media or public broadcaster to exclude people from the conversation who violate basic rules, and it is a move we should all support. The fact that somebody has a large following, is known for their “edgy” and radical attitudes or has a certain reputation should not prevent them from being excluded, because it is not a question of “balance”: anyone who does not know how to behave in public must be re-educated or excluded, whether he or she is a public figure, a politician, a film actor or a footballer.
Implementing this type of policy and applying it without exception is the only possible way to normalize the conversation and reclaim what is a fundamental space for all of us. Until we understand this, whether it’s on social media or at a personal level, and instead hide behind erroneous concepts of freedom of expression without any limits, we will continue normalizing the abnormal.
