When online cruelty becomes entertainment

Public Health & Well-being Calculating...

Kritik
16 Aug 2026
26
SubCategory | Mental Health

When online cruelty becomes entertainment

MALAYSIA is almost entirely online. According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia, 98.3% of individuals used the internet in 2025 while household internet access reached 97.1%.

Digital communication is no longer a separate corner of Malaysian life. It is where we work, obtain news, debate politics and public issues, review businesses, maintain relationships and form opinions about people we have never met.

The benefits of connectivity are enormous but so too are the growing behavioural problems: we have created spaces where provoking, humiliating and emotionally exhausting another person can become a form of entertainment.

The figures on harmful online behaviour offer some indication of its scale. The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) reported that 8,756 pieces of cyberbullying-related content were removed in 2024, compared with 1,763 in 2023 – an increase of almost fivefold.

By September 2025, MCMC had submitted more than 50,000 requests to social-media platforms to remove bullying-related content since 2022. Not every unpleasant comment qualifies as cyberbullying, and disagreement itself should never be treated as a social ill.

The more troubling issue is what increasingly surrounds disagreement: deliberate triggering, personal attacks, strangers joining pile-ons and continued harassment precisely because someone’s distress has become visible.

The pattern is familiar. A discussion begins about politics, food, parenting, education, religion, entertainment, a public figure or somebody’s personal opinion. Soon, the original subject barely matters. Intelligence is questioned, appearance is mocked, motives are invented and old photographs or posts are retrieved as ammunition.

People who were never part of the original conversation arrive to add insult, often encouraged by likes, laughter and approval from an audience and the purpose is no longer to exchange ideas or even to win an argument. The emotional reaction of another human being has itself become the attraction.

Psychology helps explain why this happens. Researchers have long described the “online disinhibition effect”, where anonymity, invisibility and psychological distance weaken some of the restraints that naturally operate during face-to-face interaction. When we say something cruel across a table, we immediately encounter its human consequences – a facial expression, a change in tone, a silence or visible discomfort.

Online, much of that feedback disappears. The person receiving the comment may be angry, humiliated or deeply distressed while the sender sees little more than a username and a text box. This makes it remarkably easy to inflict emotional harm without witnessing its impact.

The imbalance becomes greater when a crowd forms. One person may spend 10 seconds writing a cruel remark and forget about it almost immediately while the recipient encounters 50 variations of the same attack throughout the day.

Each commenter can reassure themselves that they contributed only one sentence, one joke or one sarcastic observation. Yet, those isolated contributions accumulate into what can feel like an emotional drenching for the person receiving them. The crowd rarely experiences the total weight of what it is doing because responsibility has been fragmented among hundreds of individuals.

Social media’s reward systems can intensify this behaviour. Research published in Nature Human Behaviour has found that people can overestimate the amount of moral outrage expressed by others online, making opposing groups appear more hostile than they actually are.

Other studies have shown that social reinforcement can encourage increasingly emotional expression. The implications are uncomfortable. If anger receives more attention than restraint, humiliation earns applause and the sharpest insult becomes the most shareable contribution, then escalation is not merely occurring on the platform; it is being socially rewarded within it.

This also helps explain why arguments can become personal so quickly. We often struggle to separate ourselves from the things we value or identify with. An opinion can become tied to our intelligence, a profession to our sense of competence, and something we have created or contributed to our sense of personal worth. When criticism touches any of these areas, we may stop evaluating what has been said and start defending ourselves against what we believe it says about us.

A disagreement with an argument becomes disrespect towards its author; a poor review becomes an attack on the service provider; correction is experienced as humiliation rather than information.

That inability to create psychological distance makes people easier to hurt and to manipulate. The language of being “triggered” is now common online but genuine psychological triggers should not be confused with ordinary irritation, offence or disagreement.

Strong emotional reactions can nevertheless provide useful information. They may signal that someone has touched a sense of dignity, insecurity, political identity, professional pride or fear of embarrassment. But emotion alone does not tell us whether we should act on it. Feeling anger and deciding what deserves a response are two different processes, yet social media encourages us to collapse them into one.

A useful discipline is to distinguish between criticism, abuse and provocation. Criticism, however uncomfortable, may contain information worth examining. Abuse requires boundaries and may justify blocking, reporting or intervention.

Provocation is different because its objective is often the reaction itself. Responding repeatedly to someone who is deliberately baiting us can amount to handing a stranger control over our attention, mood and time. Refusing that invitation is not passivity; sometimes it is simply good emotional judgement.

The responsibility, however, cannot be placed only on the person being targeted. Online crowds have choices too. A pile-on gains power because many people decide that one additional insult will make little difference. Screenshots are circulated, strangers are ridiculed and private embarrassment becomes public entertainment, often by people who would be deeply offended if the same treatment were directed at them.

We should be reluctant to reward cruelty with the audience it needs. There is difference between holding someone accountable for harmful conduct and joining in because humiliation has become enjoyable to watch.

Malaysia already recognises the need for stronger safeguards online. The Online Safety Act 2025 came into force on Jan 1, while parliamentary discussions have raised concerns about harmful content and algorithms’ influence on users’ emotions and behaviour.

Regulation matters when conduct becomes dangerous or unlawful, and platforms must take responsibility for the environments they create. Yet, legislation cannot regulate every sarcastic remark, vindictive response or impulse to publicly embarrass someone. Much of the remaining work is cultural.

That means our understanding of digital literacy has to mature. Knowing how to protect a password, detect a scam and identify misinformation remains important but being digitally competent should also mean recognising emotional manipulation, understanding how outrage spreads, learning to receive criticism without converting it into a threat to identity and knowing how to disagree without degrading someone.

These are not skills needed only by teenagers. Many adults who understand technology well still lose restraint once an argument moves behind a screen. None of this requires a sanitised internet in which every opinion is protected from challenge. Businesses should be reviewed honestly, public figures should be scrutinised, harmful behaviour should be confronted and bad ideas should be challenged vigorously.

A healthy digital culture is not one without disagreement; it is one capable of maintaining proportion. Before joining the next online battle, it may be worth asking what we are trying to achieve and whether the words we are about to add will clarify an issue, challenge wrongdoing or simply deepen a spectacle that already has enough spectators.

Malaysia’s digital future will depend on more than connectivity, regulation and safer platforms. It will also depend on whether we can remain psychologically mature while having unprecedented access to one another’s attention and emotions.

The goal should not be a society in which nobody is ever offended but one in which deliberately baiting, humiliating and emotionally battering another person for entertainment gradually becomes what it should have been all along: behaviour too embarrassing to applaud.

Source: when-online-cruelty-becomes-entertainment

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of Kritik.com.my. As an open platform, we welcome diverse perspectives, but the accuracy and integrity of contributed content remain the responsibility of the individual writer. Readers are encouraged to critically evaluate the information presented.