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I have watched people who are kind and decent in person become cruel online, and I have watched online spaces bring out a coarseness that would shame us face to face. We treat this as a minor social issue, a matter of etiquette. It is not. How we treat each other online is a real ethical question, because human dignity does not stop at the edge of a screen. I want to make that case seriously, from Port Harcourt, where our digital norms are still being formed.
The Person Behind the Account
Something strange happens to many of us online. People who are warm and decent in person become harsh, dismissive, or cruel behind a screen. Words get said to strangers that would never be said across a table. A coarseness takes over that we would be ashamed of face to face. And we have largely decided to treat all of this as a minor matter, a question of etiquette or online manners, not really a serious ethical concern.
I think that is a grave mistake, and I want to argue against it plainly. How we treat each other online is a real ethical question, of the same kind and seriousness as how we treat each other anywhere, because human dignity does not stop at the edge of a screen. The person on the other side of the account is not an abstraction or a target. They are a full human being, as real as the person beside you, and everything we owe a human being we owe them. This matters everywhere, and it matters with particular urgency in African digital spaces like the ones I inhabit from Port Harcourt, where the norms of online life are still being formed and we have a real chance to form them well.
Dignity Does Not Have a Physical Boundary
Start with what dignity is, because the whole argument rests on it. Human dignity is the inherent worth of every person, a worth that does not depend on their usefulness, their status, or their behaviour, and that is owed simple respect by virtue of their being human at all. It is the foundation of ethics, the reason cruelty is wrong and persons must not be treated as mere things.
The crucial point is that dignity belongs to the person, not to the setting. It does not switch off when the interaction moves onto a screen. The person you are speaking to online has exactly the same inherent worth they would have if they were standing in front of you, because it is the same person, and their worth travels with them wherever the interaction happens. There is no boundary at the edge of the screen where dignity stops applying and a person becomes fair game.
This sounds obvious when stated directly, and yet almost all online cruelty depends on quietly forgetting it. The medium makes the other person feel less real, an account rather than a human, a name rather than a face, and that reduced sense of their reality is what lets us treat them in ways we never would in person. But the feeling is false. The reduced reality is an illusion of the medium. The person is fully real, fully present, fully possessed of the dignity we owe every human being. Recovering that basic recognition, that there is always a real person behind the account, is the foundation of everything else.
How Online Spaces Erode Dignity
Online environments do not merely fail to protect dignity. Many are structured in ways that actively erode it, and naming the specific mechanisms helps us resist them.
Anonymity removes accountability. When people can act without their identity attached, the normal social consequences that restrain cruelty disappear, and behaviour that shame and reputation would prevent in person is unleashed. Dehumanisation follows easily, as the medium reduces full human beings to flat targets, accounts and opinions rather than people, making it psychologically easier to attack them. The pile-on multiplies cruelty, as many people converge on a single target, each adding a small blow that feels minor to them but lands on the target as an overwhelming collective assault, a form of harm that has no real equivalent in physical life.
Surveillance strips dignity in a different way, as online environments watch, record, and expose people, removing the privacy that dignity requires and leaving individuals permanently visible and vulnerable. And exclusion operates powerfully online, as people are shut out, ignored, or cast beyond the boundary of who counts, denied the belonging that is part of being treated as fully human. Each of these mechanisms attacks a different facet of dignity, and online spaces often combine them, which is why they can degrade human interaction so severely and so fast. Understanding them is the first step to refusing them.
What We Owe Each Other
Against all of this, what do we actually owe each other in online spaces? The answer is simple to state and demanding to live. We owe each other the same basic respect online that we owe in person, because it is the same dignity in either place.
This means treating the person behind the account as fully human, remembering their reality even when the medium works to obscure it. It means declining the cruelty that anonymity makes easy and consequence-free, on the understanding that what you owe a person does not depend on whether you can be caught. It means refusing to join the pile-on, recognising that your small contribution to a collective cruelty is still cruelty, and that being one of many does not dilute your responsibility. It means extending online the ordinary decencies, honesty, fairness, kindness, the benefit of the doubt, that you would extend to someone in front of you.
The hardest and most important part is that this holds even when the environment rewards the opposite. Online spaces are frequently engineered so that cruelty, outrage, and dehumanisation get amplified and rewarded while decency is invisible. To be a person of integrity in such a space is to treat others with dignity anyway, not because the environment encourages it but because it is right, and because your character is not for sale to whatever the platform happens to reward. That is genuinely difficult, and it is exactly what integrity means, being the same decent person online that you are in person, even where the system pays you to be worse.
What Platforms Owe
Individual responsibility is real, but it is not the whole story, because individuals act inside environments that platforms design, and design shapes behaviour powerfully. So platforms owe something too, and letting them off the hook is a mistake.
A platform that engineers outrage because outrage drives engagement, that rewards cruelty with attention, that amplifies pile-ons because conflict keeps people scrolling, is not a neutral stage on which users happen to behave badly. It is an active participant in the erosion of dignity, shaping its users toward their worst behaviour because that behaviour is profitable. Platforms owe their users environments designed to protect human dignity rather than exploit it, and a platform that profits by designing for the worst of human nature bears real responsibility for the predictable result. The person who builds the arena that rewards cruelty shares in the cruelty it produces.
This matters especially now, and especially here. In African digital spaces, from where I write in Port Harcourt, the norms are still being formed, which means we have a genuine opportunity that older digital cultures have largely lost, the chance to build online spaces and online habits that protect dignity from the start rather than trying to recover it after it has been degraded. That opportunity places a responsibility on all of us, users and builders alike, to insist that the dignity we honour in person be carried, deliberately and against the pull of the medium, into the digital spaces where more and more of our common life now happens. Human dignity does not stop at the edge of the screen. Neither should our commitment to it.
