Some really interesting (and surprising) takeaways in this research, and a very good analysis by Caitlin Dewey in Actually, the internet’s always been this bad:

A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more ‘toxic’ today than it was in the early 1990s. […] Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low. But the longer any conversation goes on, on virtually any platform, the more toxic it becomes.