Have sociological researches been made on the levels of literacy, culture, shared ethical values among the users of the many existing social networks compared to the larger national societies the users belong to? What about researches on the proportion of people with racist, homophobic or religiously intolerant attitudes on social media compared to the society as a whole?
I have begun wondering about this issue because I used to have an account on Facebook for a short time and I discovered a reflection of the society of my country, Italy, that I wish I had never discovered: although I am interested to socially interact with the opposite typology of people , I found an overwhelming majority of users, among my co-citizens, plagued by an alarming level of illiteracy and the incapability to understand anything not down to earth, full of racial hatred (which is being sed in my country by some politicians and television channels owned by people politically allied to the far right) and lacking empathy and ethical values that I thought to be shared by almost all mankind, such as respect for the life of drowned refugee children. I hope that the average of my co-citizens having an account on Facebook is worse that the average of my co-citizens as a whole.
