Unkindness Spreads at the Speed of the Internet

I’m tired of meanness. I think that a lot of other people are too. Here’s why.

Unkindness smoulders and leaps from one social media platform to another.

This month, I posted a story on social media that went viral. The story was about deliberately crossing the street to introduce myself to a neighbor who now lives in my daughter’s childhood best friend’s house. The neighbor told me that she had been saving a box of family photos that had been left behind by the previous owners since 2017 in the hopes that she could return it to them someday. I connected her and my daughter’s childhood friend and just like that, the box and family were reunited! Both my neighbor who had saved the box, and the family who didn’t realize they were missing it, were elated.

That post got almost 18,000 views and 360 likes in just two days.

Last summer I posted a story about a neighbor who was giving a grill away. He was kind enough to drive it over to my son’s house...which happened to be right around the corner from his mom’s old place...which is where the grill originally came from!

That post got almost 460,000 views and more than 13,000 likes on Threads. And more than 205,000 views and 2350 reactions on LinkedIn. And it’s still circulating on LinkedIn one year later.

I do a lot of writing about leadership, coaching and business, and I’ve had many viral posts. But none as viral as the two stories of kindness above.

To me, this is one of the strongest indicators that people are really tired of meanness.

Just open up any one of the social media apps that you use, and you won’t have to scroll more than a few seconds to find unkindness. People complaining about other people’s beliefs, their views and their actions. If you scroll through the comments section of many posts, you’ll see that most comments are unkind. Either belittling the poster or stating something negative about the post’s topic.

And the more people comment and share the post, the faster and farther that meanness spreads. Picked up and distributed by “the algorithm”, meanness travels at the speed of the internet.

When I was growing up (yes, it was a long time ago, and no, I don’t believe that everything was better then), I walked back and forth to school with friends. Sometimes we argued. Then we got home, and because there was no internet, or cell phones for texting, and if your family was like mine, you were only allowed one twenty minute landline phone call a night under the watchful eye of your mother, we had time to reflect on that argument. And realize that we really didn’t want to have a falling out with our friend.

When my daughter was growing up (she’s in her thirties now), and she argued with a friend, that argument would be shared with others through text (good old Blackberry) or even on Facebook. Instead of having time to reflect and cool down, the spread of meanness heated up and inflamed the situation.

Fast forward to today.

Just like the raging forest fires going on right now, meanness spreads from post to post and leaps from one social media platform to another. Video images of people acting meanly to others garner thousands (or more) of unkind comments and fuel the even faster spread. And even if the picture of the video is altered, taken out of context or falsely generated by AI and created by bots, like the smoke from the fires, the meanness spreads.

Meanness isn’t good for us as human beings. It’s unhealthy. It raises cortisol and adrenaline levels. It keeps us needlessly in fight, flight or freeze mode, which is exhausting. And depressing.

So, when people come across a story of kindness, they latch onto it. As a number of commenters on the grill story said, “I am so happy this had such a great ending. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and something bad to happen. But it didn’t!” People are tired of expecting meanness as the default. When they find a post about kindness, they are relieved and happy.

We can spread kindness just as easily as we can unkindness.

Here’s what you can do:

• When you see or experience a kind act, don’t keep it to yourself! Share it on social media!

• When you see meanness on social media, don’t interact with it. Starve the fire of meanness and cool down your own cortisol and adrenaline rush.

• If someone posts an unkind comment on something you’ve posted, don’t argue with them or interact. Simply block and delete.

• Post kind comments and re-share kind posts. Influence the algorithm for the better and kinder.

  
  

Meanness spreads at the speed of the internet. So can kindness. And it’s what people crave and are thirsting for.

Working together, let’s make sure that kindness goes viral.