We've seen this argument a million times before with the boogeyman du jour. For example: heavy metal and video games caused Columbine.
The problem is that violent crime has dropped as internet use has gone up. And violent crime has also dropped since social media first became a thing. So even if this is "a thing" -- it's not a widespread trend.
Personally I don't think the medium matters. If Columbine or Ruby Ridge or Waco or Oklahoma City or 9/11 happened today, I'm sure all of these people would have some sort of social media trail for us to look at and say, "a ha, this is why this person was radicalized!" followed by, "Twitter and Facebook and Google need to do a better job censoring their platforms."
What we have seen is the number of hate crimes increase quite drastically over the past few years as well as the continued rise of school shootings in America.
Contrary to popular belief, school shootings have been flat since the early 90s:
Full report here:
It can look superficially the same doesn’t it? The difference between “Judas Priest causes suicides” and here is that that the mechanism is much more understood, and there are multiple instances separated by time, place, and culture, to better examine the hypothesis. We can look at Bosnia[0], Rwanda[1], and Rohingya[2], just to name three things that have occurred in my lifetime. It’s a more extreme version of what we’ve seen with filter bibles and the sorting of media. It’s been well studied. There’s even a word for this phenomenon. It’s dehumanization.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav...
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137284150_5
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
1: http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...
Ruby Ridge
If you want to host your own hate page, you can. I think there are a lot of negative externalities of the massive communication infrastructure that people are involved in now that aren't fully understood yet.
Violent crime is down - the number of idiot antivaxers is up, for example. I think we all need to just admit the idea of connecting everyone to everyone else is actually a terrible idea - tech was wrong, the positive techno fantasy was as absurd as communism, and we need to now deal with the beast we've created.
You are making a causation argument two sentences after calling out a causation argument.
Free speech and investigative reporting and writing is essential in a functioning democracy. This is the former but just an inflammatory opinion piece. ('Why toxic online behavior is spilling into the streets').
It’ll only take throwing a few obnoxious kids into big boy prison for making terroristic threats before the ‘pranksters’ stop doing it and we’re left with the real crazies.
There is a very significant difference - someone who knows your address or phone number likely knows where you live. (perhaps less so with mobile phones compared to historically with stationary phones). And they're more likely to be in the geographical area and capable of acting on the threat.
Whereas 99% of the time someone sends a 'threat' online they do not know you, and are responding to a video / post that you made. Not that it becomes excusable, but it does make the threat much less serious.
On the other hand... their journalism (BuzzFeed<i>News</i>) is up there in quality. Such as https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/chris-hamby-buzzfeed-news and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/us/politics/george-polk-j... ("In all, journalists representing more than a dozen news organizations were recognized for reporting. Three nontraditional publications — Vice News, The Intercept and BuzzFeed News — won awards for the first time, Mr. Darnton said.")
We see these charlatans spreading vile bigotry and hatred, often directly resulting in the harm of innocent people. People spreading narratives that school shootings don't actually exist. The overall audience these people can reach has grown dramatically and the problem is that it's similar to cult behavior. You can't actually beat them with facts or through arguments. At a certain point we're going to need to face this problem head on and treat it as a proper cult.