I remember there were a lot of memes about it, most of them were incredible islamophobic or in bad taste with the victims.
I believe the internet was much smaller then. It existed, but most social hadn’t really begun yet. I still only had dialup.
9/11 was 2001, Facebook was 2004. So definitely a different place.
We had a lot of fourms back then. Myspace wouldn’t happen until '03.
forums dont really count, they are pretty niche, i think the closet one would be e-world, and the Y/a. I happened upon a location specific forum, and they go back to late 2000s.
I don’t count forums the same as modern social media. The are social places of course, but much more tight-knit, much less algorithmically ratfucked. Even 2003 Myspace and 2004 FB were much better places than what they have metastasized into.
Broadband was around. The signal to noise was much better. We had Usenet, IRC, and our own home pages.
Maybe around, but I don’t think it was ubiquitous? Even then, ADSL was pretty bad, and I wouldn’t call it broadband by today’s standards. But that could just be Australia lagging the world :)
Social media didn’t exist for the most part in 2001. There was LiveJournal and Something Awful. Most online discussions happened using instant messaging between people you knew or on discussion forums that usually were focused around an interest or niche topic.
All of those platforms had trolls but they were much more benign than they are today. Islamophobia spiked and there were spirited debates, but nothing like the vitriol we see today on even the most banal posts. The communities were much smaller to the point that most regular posters knew each other and had interacted many times, civility was maintained by that familiarity like it would be in a real community. The anonymity that comes from massive userbases were you’ll never encounter the same person twice is really what created the naked hostility we have today. There was a forum called Storm Front, which I believe is still around, a literal nazi forum but you had to be deep into the Internet to even know it existed.
After 9/11 more conspiracy theories started popping up and making their way to more mainstream sites as sort of proto-memes and it was a bad time to hold an opinion that wasn’t pro-US nationalism, but again nothing like the horrific things we see today.
From what I remember, just from small niche forums, most people were just too stunned about it to really be hateful. That’s not a big sample size but I don’t recall many people trying to be edgelords about it, everyone just seemed to read the room and just see that it was fucked up
This isn’t true, there were racist fucks immediately targeting Sikhs.
People were literally killed in retaliatory attacks (that often targeted the wrong fucking religion).
The question asked “on the internet” and I responded with my personal experience. Take it down a notch.
I didn’t realize I was up any notches. Maybe it is you who needs to take your defensiveness down a notch.
Also, hate speech went way up online after 9/11. Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
You need a healthier outlet
Nothing to do with the internet; I was in elementary at the time and jokes we were joking about it within 2 weeks.
Wasn’t really on the internet back then, but we joked about it in school the very next day.
No idea, I only used the internet for messenger with people I knew irl
2001, dint really have an internet per ce, forums dint really exist in large numbers yet. the biggest news aggregate dint exist for another half a decade. . reddit dint really take off til 2010-16ish. there was a news aggregate forum that existed in the late 2000s, got replaced by reddit, and Y/answers.
Dude there were way more online forums in 2000 than there are now.
I belonged to many movie message boards, gaming boards and etc. Its all consolidated and controlled now.
There was usenet.
I was a moderator (we didn’t call it that) at an online chess server, with live chat. When the attacks happened, people started to talk about it. At first I tried to moderate them, sending them to appropriate chat rooms, but soon the admins told me these were special circumstances and to just let people talk.
What was especially strange for me was that I might’ve been among the first people in my neck of the woods to hear about it. People were not chronically online at the time - I just happened to be online, and in a live chat environment with Americans, so I heard about it that way. When I turned on the TV, there was nothing yet. I kept switching between channels, and finally CNN was the first to interrupt their programming for a special bulletin, followed quickly by BBC. Other channels followed a bit later.
As for the conversations online, I mostly remember shock, and later fear of what this might start. Jokes and memes came later.
The Internet was already a very different place back then. These days, most people are on a few very large platforms. Back then it was a lot of smaller sites and forums, whose individual vibes depended a lot on its own moderation policies.
I spent much of that day with other players of the MUD-style game I played at the time, figuratively huddling together, sharing updates about our people in NYC as we heard from them.
For a time, I think, people were kind of stunned. The US had thought itself invulnerable, you understand.
But it wasn’t very long before the raging islamophobia began, and a hard turn toward the direction of fascism. But also the reaction to that. The split was stark.
And is still going on to this day, I suppose.
So no, people didn’t quite stop being dicks. If anything they only started dicking harder.
Reddit and other big social media didn’t exist yet, but there were plenty of jokes in the chat for Counter-Strike and other multiplayer games at the time. It wasn’t even talked about much on the forums I frequented at the time. But I never paid for Something Awful, which was the biggest one around. Maybe it was discussed there.
It was truly impressive how niche forums and start-up websites coalesced to support an anti-war movement that brought 300-400k people to New York (and similar numbers in cities globally) to protest the invasion of Iraq.
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) was one such focal group.
Interestingly it still largely felt organic and spread by word of mouth. With no real social media to amplify or mute.
The discourse today feels much more controlled. And the powers globally continue to manipulate internet discourse increasingly.
Despite millions collectively protesting globally- a coalition of the willing invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 using the tragedy to support the globalist ambitions of the father and his cadre
one satirical website summarized it like this: https://inadequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html
Americans were turbo racist is all i remember
Generally, people weren’t dicks or trolls online quite as much at the time. The internet wasn’t for everyone in 2001. Most people got their news from TV. I had a family member call me to turn on the TV.
The lack of decency part was how quickly the anti-Arab sentiment came out of the woodwork. With a lot of people still sort of attuned to it from the first Iraq war, it was easy for a lot of people to fall back into that. Tons of racist cartoons and photoshoped images sent around, mostly by email. Lots of email forwards. To be fair, people were extremely pissed, and since it was not a nation-state doing this, it was hard to have someone to blame in the traditional sense.
But, in general, people were more shocked and terrified. Especially as the anthrax stuff happened a few weeks later, rampant speculation and conspiracy theories ramped up. All of that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” started within days. A lot of “woah, I can’t believe it” stuff. It took a few days before things got back to normal.
More than a few days, more like months. One could argue that things haven’t returned to “normal” ever since.
Found this interesting Pew study about the internet from 1 year after 9/11:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2002/09/05/one-year-later-september-11-and-the-internet-2/
Take it with a grain of salt, I think it comes off as a little overly optimistic, especially given some of the dire things it talks about (massive support for giving away our freedoms, etc).
I did just see at the bottom that there’s literally 8 pages, and I was basing all that on just the first page so maybe I’ll read more or at least skim through the rest.
Edit: holy shit (from pg 2):
