I can absolutely confirm this, I fell down an unfortunate rabbit hole of posting about politics on Reddit (fairly mainstream politics, but politics nonetheless). There's nothing quite like the dopamine rush of righteous anger, and mixing that with the disinhibition of just being another pseudonym it's quite easy to understand why "enrangement is engagement" is such a powerful and insideous tool to drive people's use of social media. I was a shitehawk and I'm not afraid to admit it.

I'd never advocate something as obviously ridiculous as requiring ID to post on social media or the other sort of rubbish people outside of the tech industry come up with to deal with this problem, though I'd also point out that quitting Reddit did wonders for my mental health and generally made me less of an arse. Facebook strikes me as even worse, even more tuned towards pissing you off and preying on that human need to have the last word.

As I recall, when Facebook was first becoming a thing, a major narrative was that the quality of discourse and level of civility would be so much better than anonymous platforms - after all, they're your friends, of course they're gonna be on their best behavior. Seems that didn't happen, at least partially because Facebook figured out that civility is boring, doesn't get clicks.

Our evolutionary history is not filled with times of peace and enlightenment. Simply creating the internet and giving to the public wasn't going to change this fundamental equation.

The need to judge these people as "garbage" who simply aren't handling technology well is worthy of interest itself.

It isn't that they aren't handling technology well. It is that a large segment of the population consists of terrible people. Technology is just their latest way of being terrible.