Until relatively recently, women and people from racial and ethnic minorities were pre-cancelled. And if they got too noisy, there was far worse on the menu---the first year in US history without a lynching was something like 1952, and that's literal torture, mutilation, and death; not having people say bad things about you on the Internet.
Was it more civil? Yeah, sure. It would only be spoken about in public rarely and the better classes of people would certainly never face it. It would certainly be more civil, as long as everyone stayed in their place.
An entirely different class of bad behaviors that were commonplace in the past has absolutely no bearing on whether or not social media makes us worse people and just confuses the issue for no reason.
