This is really interesting. I feel that the whole world seems to be moving towards an echo chamber and pack mentality whereby offence is immediately taken to anything that is not fawning praise.
It results in a population of people who are less able to evaluate and improve their choices with constructive criticism, and crucially unable to defend or argue their case when required to do so.
That said, bullying and mean behaviour (I like the definitions above) have become massively more prevalent and problematic with the immersion of social media in our lives, so I can understand why some people, particularly younger (I’m in my 30s) are reluctant or scared to tolerate any kind of critical response for fear of engaging with hyper negativity. I say critical, because critical is not always the same as criticism in the sense that you are being asked to argue or defend a point in question.
The only way to shut down a bully online is to call out bullying. Unfortunately this is being too liberally applied to people who simply disagree with you or god forbid, don’t like something.
My brother is the prime example of living in his own echo chamber, he will scream at me until he’s blue in the face “you never listen to me” , whereas I’m listening to every word he says. I just don’t agree with him. In his world, if you don’t agree with him you’re not listening as it’s absolutely impossible for him to be wrong.
Likewise you see this all the time on AIBU at the moment. People coming on asking a question and then aggressively attacking people who challenge them on their position (which is what I like about AIBU, the fact you can sense check yourself in an anonymous forum). I was reported recently simply for disagreeing with the position of a poster who then clearly said all she had wanted was for people to agree with her. Needless to say nothing came of the report whatsoever, I’d done nothing wrong other than have a different point of view (with frankly more experience) to the OP.
The good thing about this situation is that it makes clear that bullying and hyper negativity, and meanness as above, has no place in any society. I think this is very important.
The bad thing is that these lower levels of resilience are leading people to call bullying too quickly simply because they feel offended or can’t effectively argue their case, which in turn minimises the seriousness of actual bullying.
So yes OP, I completely agree. But I don’t think it’s limited to MN and I don’t think it’s limited to “free speech”. Accusations of bullying are used to shut down anyone that has a difference of opinion to you or god forbid, doesn’t like the same thing.