An alien arriving on Earth in the year 2023 might believe social media was created solely for strangers to yell at each other. It has become unremarkable that, for example, an anodyne tweet by a woman who enjoys drinking coffee with her husband every morning would provoke outrage. “This is cute and all but did you think of all the people who wake up to work grueling hours, wake up on the streets, alone, or with chronic pain before posting this?” fumed one person. Or that expressing sadness over how difficult the early months of the pandemic were for new parents leads to a series of replies detailing how others “had it worse.” These exchanges are varied in subject, but what is consistent is how these banal discussions predictably devolve into a fight over moral superiority.
Look at any social media post that has more than a dozen responses; inevitably, one of them will attack the original post on the basis of some perceived moral transgression. Discussions of bike lanes deteriorate into fights about ableism; posts about the environmental impact of fast fashion unravel into accusations of elitism; the term “pregnant people” is somehow degrading to women. This can also take absurd forms. When an American writer tweeted that Canadian law dictates all burgers must be well done (not true but funny), the replies quickly turned rancid like room-temperature raw meat. All of a sudden, posters were deploying the suffering of Indigenous people and the victims of gun violence to dismiss the other country’s position on preparing ground beef.
