I think the addition of the social media anonymity does increase the willingness to enter into "reactionary immaturity" but, in my opinion, it's more of a result in our philosophical stance. You can travel, as I often do, to campuses around the country and hear it in the rhetoric of the average campus student. Since the advent of the "New Left" in the 1950's the idea that all anybody is doing is telling stories has grown to prevail upon our campuses as the way to view truth and falsity. If I present something as true, our students are told, I'm just telling you a story (a "narrative") and you can be pretty sure I'm telling it in a way that enhances my own or my groups power. Thus, the reasoning goes, it must be slanted, biased, etc.... and therefore not really "true" at all, but only "spin."
Now here a short description of how we got there. In the Enlightenment Western philosophy, being impressed by the rapid development of scientific inquiry and discovery, thought, as Descartes says in his "Discourse on Method," that if you could find a single thing that was undeniably true you could build from that, using reasoning, investigation and logic, to discover all truth. Pretty sweet, if "truth" wasn't so complicated and difficult, right? So they started off and pretty soon found that they disagreed in major ways about the meaning of the things they were discovering! Even the old "tried and true" vision of God creating everything as it currently is (with some variations) fell by the wayside to be replaced with a new theory -- that all things evolved from the Big Bang or some other starting point of the Universe, the cause of which was unknown, or maybe the Universe is eternal? In any case, within a few decades it was pretty clear that even if you think, and therefore, are, your knowledge isn't going to get very far because people seem to "know" things differently. So how do we "know" this or that? The answer, eventually -- and the process took several hundred years -- was, "you don't know anything for certain." Okay, but at least I'm still standing, right? Not exactly.
You are standing on, ultimately, subjective sand. Sigh. At the same time, as the Enlightenment ideal of discovering all truth started to get a bit discouraged, especially when people took some of the ideas and applied them. If "survival of the fittest" is the driving mechanism of evolution, shouldn't we get rid of the weak? AND, if we do get rid of all the inferior races, doesn't that prove we are the "supreme one?" Nasty stuff but also logically consistent. Of course long before we got to that result, people were finding the whole failure of evidence and reasoning to, well, "enlighten" us to be a bit stiff. Rules were developed for all kinds of things -- "scientific" and even "theological" to determine precisely which people were inferior and which were not... again, scientifically and/or theologically. The reaction to this mechanistic view of things was Romanticism.
Romanticism says that Nature is good. Nature with a capital "N." And, combined with the radical skepticism of the 18th century, that meant, as Shelley put it, there must be a "divine spark" in every thing of nature. If so then we are all naturally speaking, good. Cool! But then, as Rousseau asks, if we are all so good, why do we have slaves? His answer is that the farther we get from nature -- the higher we go in the ability to control others (the more powerful we are) the more we are corrupted. So.... "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely?" Right! From this two thing occurred.
First, following the lead provided, Marx and Engels concentrate on explaining that the ills of society are caused by men rising too high above other men and therefore class struggle is what it's all about. Their solution is to form a nation "of the people, for the people and, by the people" and hope it never perishes from the earth. Hmmm.... sounds rather familiar, doesn't it? In any case, because the little guy is closer to nature and therefore less corrupted, let's put him in charge. He'll just do what needs to be done or die trying...Hello, Boxer, the horse in "Animal Farm."
Second, this vision of humanity -- that we are, each and every one of us, intrinsically good, means that each and every one of us should be treated as the equal to each and every one of you. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" was the call of the French Revolution and if you didn't agree, you must have lost your head....or were about to. And to the east of the French, just a hundred years later the Bolsheviks instituted the "Red Scare" to insure everybody was properly trained and committed to the equality of anyone who was properly trained and committed and a member of the proper party so everyone knew the same things, even if they might change truth next week -- and that was about 60 years before 1984!. And if you didn't understand the ever changing truth, you needed a long vacation in Siberia to be retrained while your relaxed with the hoe in your hand, and rested on a few potatoes and gruel for a few years.
In the end then, Western civilization rejected the idea of "truth" as an absolute that could be known, and turned instead, to truth as the story you tell yourself. Everything could be shown to reflect this and if you constructed some argument about it I could de-construct it by merely showing how your ideas were motivated by your desire to empower you and/or your group. Hmmm.... we know what that sort of "I'm above you" thinking does, don't we? It corrupts, doesn't it? In the end one guy in Sarajevo decided there should be nobody in charge -- he was called an anarchist -- and shot another guy, the Archduke Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, and that started a big fracas called the WWI, not to be confused with the even bigger fracas called WWII which grew out of a bunch of people at Versailles assumig that winning a war meant they could stick it to the losers. Which they did until a guy called Adolf came along and really stuck it to them. All of which brings us to our current problem...the nastiness of communication.
After the bombs got dropped and people woke up to a very, very different world. The philosophically minded were still saying "truth can't be known for certain, of course, but that got translated to the shortened version, "truth can't be known," and it was a relief that it was so because no I could just tell my story and you had to agree. After all, "your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth," which was very close to "you should believe my truth because I will riot, burn down buildings and otherwise show you just how powerful I am when I am mad! "We're mad as hell and we're not taking it anymore," was presented as the rallying cry of the little guy, even if he or she had a lot of advanced degrees in subjects like, "English," "Women's Studies," or the real granddaddy of them all, "Political Science." All of which means they ended up "believe whatever you want since it's all subjective anyway."
In summary, a good deal of the nastiness is derived from the philosophy of our culture where students are told they can choose what truth they want to believe and since they are closer to "nature" and thus more "pure" ("innocent is usually the term applied to the young), they should just "follow their heart." This gives them permission to do "whatever they think is right in their own eyes," which is how the story Noah is introduced. Funny how things go around and around and around until we are all too dizzy and just fall down. "Follow your heart," really means, "use your own emotional measure of right and wrong to determine your course," and therefore, if people don't feel the way you do it must be because they are morally inferior and "insensitive" and touched by the appropriate "phobia."
It also means that the only thing that counts is the power to enforce your vision of the truth and thus, whatever means you need to use is justified since it makes your vision the only allowed. Shout down the speaker, troll the forum contributor, march, riot, protest, all of it counts as okay so long as you win in the end! "History is dead" it is argued because the "winners write the history" and, that being said, they certainly will never write it in anything but glowing terms where they are the saints and those bad guys the evil ones. Now you have an idea why Regan's "Evil Empire" was so roundly laughed at on our Universities while everybody else didn't get the joke and thought he was actually on to something. But he was only the President and couldn't possibly ever know anything the pointy heads of academia didn't know. In any case, "win at all costs and write a glowing history of how you did it fairly, justly, and always, always, for the "little guy" because he's the pure of heart, naturally speaking," is the mantra now.
The vision of the average politically active college student is that he/she is a little messiah who's understanding of life is superior to all those corrupted people -- you know the ones who disagree with my recipe for "social justice?" All those guys are corrupt and should not be allowed to even think of stepping onto our pure and free campus where all the young, innocent students are being carefully and honestly fed the current politically correct views.
Whew, and I said it was going to be short? Well, it is, actually. Hope it helps.
AJ