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Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to other online spaces like Twitter and Reddit where the discourse today is so toxic that it has desensitised people into accepting or even encouraging abusive behaviour. Name-calling is a typical example. It’s something that should register as abusive but doesn’t for most people any more, because in these very high-profile online spaces it’s not just normative, it’s actively rewarded with likes and upvotes. It’s probably impossible to not have that seep into most people’s baseline expectations for online conduct.

An army of dictatorial tone-policing moderators won’t create a safe space free from abuse, just a different kind of toxic space. So it is a very hard problem, not solvable by just kicking out a couple of bad apples. We are all swimming in a sea that causes the apples to rot.



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