A cop-out? No, it's an explanation. How are you going to reverse the trend? First you have to understand the underlying factors. It's incredibly naive to think this type of impulse never existed before just because it's permanently recorded and visible for the first time.
Humans aren't feral, their patterns of behavior are dictated by culture, education, etc, regardless of "impulses". People may have impulses to hurt or steal from others, but those impulses can be controlled and the impacts of those impulses can be diminished on society. Socio-cultural norms and education teach people that there are other ways to get what you want than theft, for example, and provide strong discouragement against engaging in such "anti-social" behavior. On top of that there are legal proscriptions against such behavior. All of this adds together to massively reduce the level of murder, rape, and theft in civilized humans vs. hypothetical feral human populations.
And the same dynamics can occur with individuals hurling abuse online. Those individuals could experience consequences for their actions (from twitter, valve, potentially the criminal justice system in some cases, etc.) from institutions as well as from society as a whole. Telling a game developer "I will rape you!" should be an action that dramatically curtails the perpetrators career options and results in losing friends, but today it doesn't.
Sure, people hold dark impulses inside them routinely, everyone understands that. That doesn't mean they are uncontrollable. This is a recent phenomenon, which itself is proof enough that it is not due to some uncontrollable universal urge.
How do you hold people accountable without compromising anonymity, though? And if you compromise anonymity, how do you avoid a chilling effect on those who depend on it for e.g., political activism? Seems like a dilemma to me.
Anonymity isn't an issue for some of these things.
For example, when you're interacting in a customer service context on, say, steam, you are not anonymous. Valve can change its TOU to make it so that you forfeit all claims to redress if you use abuse during a customer service interaction, and can further scale that up to include additional consequences (banning you from participation in certain ways or from certain benefits).
Additionally, "in band" consequences don't have to compromise anonymity. On twitter or facebook, for example, you can have abuse reports that are verified result in different levels of account restriction. You can make it so that the account's posts are no longer visible in other people's timelines as replies, for example (e.g. they are only visible to people who specifically follow that user or when specific posts are linked to directly). You can restrict accounts in other ways and even block access to accounts for short periods of time. Or you can ban people forever. All of these techniques have been used for years and years to prevent abusive behavior, the only reason they haven't been used effectively against this particular sort of abuse is because of apathy on the part of most platform owners, but that can change easily.
I don’t think this is a trend at all. Just go to a baseball game and you’ll see plenty of people yelling invectives at the umpire and players. That’s not new at all.
Road rage is another related symptom. There’s something special about pseudo-anonymity than enables a small percentage of people to act like jerks.
The horrible comments are just a function of anonymity at scale.
