Illustration: Alex Gamsu Jenkins for Bloomberg Businessweek
As conventional wisdom would have it, the internet is more toxic than ever. Anyone old enough to have been around during the 2010s can remember Twitter as a place where people made friends and Instagram as a distribution platform for breakfast-plate portraiture. Now, it seems, we’re all locked in unending flame wars, egged on by malevolent algorithms, foreign agents and nefarious bots.
A group of researchers tested this thesis by gathering 500 million comments people had made at different times in the past 34 years on eight popular online platforms, from Usenet to Facebook. The team then ran the data through a machine-learning tool Google developed to help moderators flag toxic content, which it classifies as any “rude, disrespectful or unreasonable comment likely to make someone leave a discussion.”
The group published its findings in Nature in 2024. It concluded that the amount of online meanness has been more or less consistent across services and over time. Conversations tend to deteriorate if they include people with starkly differing opinions or if they go on for a long time. Perhaps most surprising, people don’t necessarily leave conversations when they turn toxic.
Walter Quattrociocchi, head of the Center of Data Science and Complexity for Society at Sapienza Università di Roma. Photographer: Claudia Bianchi
The study suggests the idea that the internet is getting worse is all in our heads and directs blame away from social media companies and onto social media users. “On toxicity, the human tendency is stronger than platform design,” says Walter Quattrociocchi, head of the Center of Data Science and Complexity for Society at Sapienza Università di Roma and one of the study’s authors. Being rude to one another on the internet is “an inherent part of our behavior,” he says.
But Quattrociocchi also says there are plenty of reasons the modern-day internet feels so bad. Research has shown that social media can lead to political polarization and push some people to compulsive use.
Social media is also becoming less interactive, with people scrolling passively instead of posting, a shift resulting at least in part from fears about the consequences of saying anything. While Quattrociocchi’s team observed people often staying in toxic conversations, he says it had no way of measuring how online toxicity scares people away from interacting at all.
In other words, there’s justification for the feeling that online life isn’t what it used to be. As for the question of who’s to blame—the companies that designed the modern internet or the people who are using it—the answer seems to be both.