I don’t know, this sounds very mind body duality to me but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume such a duality exists?

I think being removed from legal or social ramifications enables a lot of misbehavior. If there were social or legal ramifications for online behavior, then maybe people would behave consistently online and offline. In fact, you see that with places like LinkedIn.

Before social media, “trolling” was a game of inciting reactions without malicious intent. IIRC the norm was to induce anger or reaction or exhaustion without using violent language, like death threats etc. But of course people always behave stupidly for any number of reasons! The death threat people, from my old school pov, are not OG trolls. The death threat people are politically motivated actors or sociopaths.

So I think it’s less about being real online vs fake, and more about what you’re doing vs everyone else. If you’re looking for a cozy time online, then someone coming in to incite reaction by being contrarian (because that’s interesting to them) would seem aggravating to you, and that’s just unkind of the contrarian person (or troll).

If you’re shitposting and assume everyone is just a troll trolling trolls (and that’s true), then all interactions are performative and a game. However this cannot apply anymore because the rules of engagement on the web have changed, and there a lot more people online now with different needs and different expectations. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being inclusive. The chans etc. are filled with glowies or nation state actors, so it’s not worth engaging in old school trolling in any form because you just provide convenient camouflage for people with malicious intent or political agendas.

So in short no, I don’t think body vs non body is the reason for differences in irl or online behavior.

Makes sense. It does make me wonder how many people I meet IRL secretly want to beat me up though.