Against Malice Signaling
What really has a chilling effect on speech?
There’s a term that originally comes from the field of social psychology, but has since been co-opted by right-wing internet people. The term is “virtue signaling.” It’s typically used to mean something like “political correctness,” or the act of being sanctimonious about a particular social issue so that one can feel morally or intellectually superior to others. While I can see why some people might find this kind of thing annoying, I tend to worry much more about the opposite extreme, or what I guess you’d call “malice signaling.”
This is the act of being the most obnoxious, mean-spirited jerk you can possibly be, going out of your way to offend people and hurt their feelings, mostly online. Why? Maybe just for the hell of it. Maybe out of genuine prejudice and resentment towards others. Maybe because it makes insecure men feel like tough guys (and yes, it is mostly guys who do this).
Of course, it’s really quite the opposite of toughness. Sitting behind your computer all day and picking fights with people in bad faith over subjects you know little about, saying derogatory things just to get a rise out of them while reveling in your own self-righteousness — it all actually seems rather pathetic and cowardly.
This phenomenon is not terribly dissimilar to something like road rage. People yell obscenities and flip each other off in their cars because they feel they’re in a safe space. When we know there’s no way the other person can simply turn around and punch us for it, our inner-caveman can come out, causing us to say nastier things than we’d ever dream of saying in person.
Putting it this way, malice signaling might just seem pretty innocuous and childish — juvenile behavior that we can simply laugh off. But malice signaling taken to an extreme can have real world consequences.
We now know that some of the men who do this kind of thing online end up becoming radicalized by right-wing extremists. Some are even driven to commit acts of terrorism (recall the 17-year-old shooter who recently murdered several protestors, or the multiple plots to abduct prominent politicians that were recently foiled). Others, while not inclined to violence, end up essentially forming a strange, nebulous ideology around triggering other people and suppressing already-marginalized voices, going out of their way to insult and demean anyone they don’t agree with, often under the guise of being “the real victims.” Many of these people end up voting for unstable demagogue politicians (who in turn encourage more cruelty and violence) just to stick it to their “woke” adversaries. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
This behavior is so profoundly unhealthy, not just for the people engaging in it, but for society as a whole. When enough people come to see the world as a zero-sum game where their prime objective is to hurt and dehumanize all the people who are different from them… well, we end up where we are today.
Furthermore, this is the kind of behavior we should worry about possibly having a chilling effect on our speech and expression. This may or may not be stating the obvious, but most people don’t want to be bombarded with a never-ending stream of seething hatred. People get tired of dealing with it, and that can lead to apathy, the last thing we need in this moment.
For all the hand-wringing over left-wing “cancel culture,” it seems like we should be far more concerned about a phenomenon that’s actually doing real harm.
Far from being an innocuous joke, malice signaling seems to be yet another byproduct of the toxic tribalism that flourishes online. I can’t claim to know what the best solution is, but surely it has to start with correctly identifying the problems.
So the next time someone accuses you of “politically correct virtue signaling” because you decided not to use a hateful slur, or supported a cause they don’t agree with, remember that all you’re really guilty of is being a decent, empathetic human being, and that the person accusing you is probably just malice signaling. The only person they should be engaging with is a professional therapist.
