Toxic
“Toxic”– a cartoon that illustrates how toxic behavior on social media is an issue that no one is effectively addressing.
Social media allows people to share their lives, but it also allows others to criticize, belittle, bully, and berate others on such a grand scale that it sometimes leads to depression and in extreme cases, suicide.
The numerous studies proving this and tragic personal stories have pushed governments and social media companies to act, but neither has done a good job.
New legislation is often ambiguously worded (e.g. UK’s Online Safety Bill) or just drowns us in further legal wranglings (e.g. California’s proposed Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act), with the overall intention of pushing the issue for the social media companies to handle.
Yet, social media companies are not the best arbitrators of social behavior and norms. Perhaps the shift to Web 3.0, where a token holder’s interests in a future social media platform incentivize consumers not to be malicious, could be a better model than the top-down approach of most current proposals.
