Active shooter situation reported in Christchurch, New Zealand

[HylianSwordsman]

Immersiveunreality said:

HylianSwordsman said:

I did say that I understand that as a concept it doesn't have to be toxic. I suppose you're right that the news doesn't focus on the positive, but it's not just the news, it's what gets shared on other social media. I don't use Twitter because I hate the character limit, but whenever anything spreads from Twitter to another online hangout, like Reddit or even this site, it's almost always something negative. My point isn't that Twitter's toxicity within itself can be measured by counting news headlines, it's more that it certainly feels to me that whenever something happens on Twitter that ends up mattering in the real world, it's negative. Like #trashtag for instance, that's good, that's people being inspired to clean up lots of trash, cool. But if you tried to count all the good stuff like that that Twitter has inspired, and all the good and progress and healing that's come from it, and count all of the nasty stuff that's been inspired by it, like people being recruited to ISIS, being inspired to do a mass shooting, or the less serious but still toxic to society stuff like cancel culture and outrage culture, and you tried to compare the pile of the good stuff that's actually affected the real world to the pile of bad stuff that's actually affected the real world, I think the pile of good stuff isn't worth the big pile of nasty that came with it. So overall it feels really toxic to me. Again, social media as a whole doesn't inherently HAVE to be toxic, but Twitter, the way it's run now, certainly seems to be when you see the effect it has had on the rest of society.

aaargh i had typed a long response to this but it is lost because the vgchartz connection was lost or something. Very irritating but will respond later.

Ugh, that's the worst. Sorry that happened to you. Nothing saps your mental energy quite like typing a long well thought out response and having it get ruined by a technological glitch.