About POP!

POP! is INQUIRER.net’s premier pop culture channel, delivering the latest news in the realm of pop culture, internet culture, social issues, and everything fun, weird, and wired. It is also home to POP! Sessions and POP! Hangout,
OG online entertainment programs in the
Philippines (streaming since 2015).

As the go-to destination for all things ‘in the now’, POP! features and curates the best relevant content for its young audience. It is also a strong advocate of fairness and truth in storytelling.

POP! is operated by INQUIRER.net’s award-winning native advertising team, BrandRoom.

Contact Us

Email us at [email protected]

Address

MRP Building, Mola Corner Pasong Tirad Streets, Brgy La Paz, Makati City

Girl in a jacket

This study explains why social media arguments are so toxic

A tweet and a Tiktok video circulated on the internet at the end of September, discussing a significant problem becoming more common in current social media. We can take a look at the two-minute video below:

 

To summarize, the TikTok user in the video talks about how people in social media can twist something posted in good faith. A commenter can turn a seemingly innocent and light-hearted post into something cynical and foul so that they’d look high and mighty to the general public.

This tweet below is a simplified version of similar occurrences:

The TikTok user explains the issue perfectly: “People online are in this fantasy land where if every sentence that’s ever uttered isn’t catered to them, and [doesn’t] have every box checked off, and isn’t like a f-cking PHD student’s essay, then they found a loophole where they can feel high and mighty today by yelling at someone for something they didn’t even say.”

For more emphasis, another example is this:

As a result, many people online have to resort to a ridiculous writing style that includes pre-emptive defense just so that they won’t get hated on by a self-righteous commenter. Here’s an example of that type of post:

There is generally less freedom to post just a simple thought because of the fear of being ripped to shreds by someone else who isn’t necessarily in their right mind.

Why are there so many of these types on social media? These people want to feel superior, intelligent, and dominant while making someone else seem stupid. These types of arguments can be seen in the anti-vax movement as well:

 

Thankfully, researchers published a study in PLoS One that examines this exact phenomenon. They call it “Moral Grandstanding – publicly opining on morality and politics to impress others, and so to seek social status.”

They conducted six studies on many subjects and ultimately came to this conclusion: “Collectively, these findings provide support for an account of moral grandstanding that conceptualises it as a status-seeking behaviour that is driven by status-seeking motives.”

With their results, we can say that people who practice moral grandstanding genuinely do it for status-seeking and not for anything else.

Hopefully, armed with this knowledge, victims of moral grandstanding would find it appropriate to ignore it completely.

For those who do it, we hope they realize that it’s pretty easy to see through their selfish intentions.

 

Other POP! stories you might like:

Think twice while you scroll and post this campaign season

A newbie voter’s guide to the COMELEC Voter Registration process

Catch Poblete if you can, everyone except the government did

About Author

Senior Writer

Related Stories

Popping on POP!