Opinion | Why our attempt to escape online outrage might fail

Last week in India, there was a mass exodus from Twitter. Everyone left to join Mastodon, a federated social media platform whose single biggest attraction is that it’s still moderated by humans. While the immediate reason for the migration was the suspension of lawyer Sanjay Hegde’s Twitter account, for most users on my timeline, this was just the latest in a series of unfortunate incidents that had diminished their Twitter experience. They had grown tired of what the platform (being facetiously referred to as the “birdsite”) had become, filled as it is with hate and intolerance. They yearned for a simpler, less offensive environment where debate and healthy discourse is still preferred over meaningless outrage. Mastodon, at least for now, seems to be it.

There was once a time when outrage served a useful purpose. When we first evolved into a social species, it was difficult to enforce social conduct.