Does The internet make us more intolerant? A contextual analysis in 33 countries

This paper aimed to study the Internet’s impacts on moral intolerance and social intolerance. Taking the perspective of media ecology, this paper viewed the Internet as a context and explored how it affects social context in which intolerance is formed. Using the data from the World Values Survey 2010–2014, this paper carried out multilevel analyses with 48,841 respondents in 33 countries. The results show a couple of antithetical effects. First, intolerance is enhanced by the Internet penetration as a context but is reduced by the individual use of the Internet as a medium. Second, the effects of the Internet penetration are counteracted by the Internet participation, which builds up a robust democracy that functions to buffer the informational impacts of the Internet.