In 2020, a man from West Virginia decided not to cancel his Thanksgiving plans, even though the coronavirus pandemic was in one of its deadliest seasons in the United States. On Facebook, he’d written something vague about not buying into the media’s “narrative.” A year later, just before Christmas, his wife was dead from COVID-19. He posted again on Facebook, asking for prayers for his children as they faced a sad holiday without their mom.

At this point, someone, maybe one of the man’s friends, took screenshots of the posts about these two events and submitted them to the “Herman Cain Award” Facebook page, where an administrator shared them and linked to the man’s profile. “Comments are open [and] his page is mostly public …” someone wrote. This meant that the man could be targeted by the group’s members, who dedicate themselves—along with their compatriots on a Reddit forum with the same name—to lambasting “COVIDIOTS,” people who died of COVID-19 after denying its existence or downplaying its potential harms. The “award” was named for the Tea Party personality Herman Cain, who was such a person.

Members of this group have spent their time visiting pages for the deceased and writing things like “Another one bites the dust!” and “nAtUrAl ImMuNiTy,” or posting a bunch of laughing emoji or a meme of Yoda saying “Around, he fucked. Find out, he did.” One guy replies to old comments from friends and family members of the deceased and says, “You did not pray hard enough. He’s dead. Why didn’t you pray harder?” or “You sent only three pairs of praying hands. Jesus counts them on Facebook. other people sent four pairs.” Maybe it’s shocking to see comments like that, or maybe you’ve seen them all before. If you’ve spent any substantial amount of time on the internet in the past three years, avoiding them entirely would be difficult—a fact that is shocking in itself.

[From the September 2023 issue: How America got mean]

Some of the Facebook page’s more active users keep a Google Doc listing every profile that’s been shared since September 2021. It reached its 3,595th, and possibly final, addition in May of this year—nothing has been added since. “It’s becoming harder and harder to find people to feature,” Rick Salvatoriello, who once frequented the “Herman Cain Award” page, explained to me. “Maybe that means they’re all dead. Maybe that means that word’s got out that if you’re going to put this stuff online, people are going to find you and you’re going to have to deal with them. I don’t know.”

Even if the Herman Cain Award is truly done—fizzling out the same month that the World Health Organization declared an end to the COVID emergency—its spirit will linger on the internet. More than three years after the pandemic started, we’re left with the fact of these bizarre online spaces and their creepy rituals: a social-media page like “Herman Cain Award,” or the #DiedSuddenly hashtag, which conspiracy theorists use to warp family tragedies into “evidence” against the vaccines, or a library of viral videos of people melting down over their disagreements. As angry as the social-media discourse was at the start of the pandemic, the post-vaccine conversation might be even worse—a mess of internet-enabled political schadenfreude, which surely won’t be eased by the latest spike in coronavirus cases or the beginnings of another contentious presidential-election cycle. To really understand how this kind of behavior became common on mainstream platforms—not in the dark recesses of the web, but among your friends on Facebook—you have to speak to the people engaging in it.

After the journalist Billy Ball’s 6-year-old son died in January, the result of a cerebral-swelling condition, he wrote in this magazine, “My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.” In his essay, he described how the pain of this loss had been compounded by the arrival—on social media, via email, in the comments section beneath a link to his child’s online obituary—of anti-vaccine activists who insisted, with no evidence, obviously, that Ball’s child must have died because he’d been given the COVID-19 shot. Some trolled with animated GIFs (of Bill Gates clapping and smiling, for example). Others seemed enraged. “It isn’t cruel to state the obvious,” one wrote. “What’s cruel is to continue to promote a jab that has killed so many knowing that your own child died from it.” Ball was forced to wonder why so many people on the internet would write to him to tell him that he had murdered his child. Even if they were confused enough to think it, who could imagine saying it?

Most of this harassment happened on Twitter, after Elon Musk took over and expressed a commitment to “free speech” but before it became X, and much of it is still easily searchable and readable months later. There are hundreds of posts there, and more on Facebook. Some of them are delusional and apparently serious—written by people who genuinely believe that giving your child a vaccine makes you a “sick psychopath” who will one day “have to answer to God.” Many users posted under their real, full name, next to a picture of their face, complicating the easy narrative that the anonymity of the internet is what makes such behavior possible.

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When I wrote to some of the people who had harassed Billy Ball and other grieving parents earlier this year, some of them, as could be expected, didn’t want to discuss anything with me. But many of them did agree to talk. Luke Portell, a man I wrote to on Facebook, was a bit surprised that I would ask him about posts he’d made, when he felt his motivations were obvious. He defended a sarcastic tweet that he had posted when Representative Sean Casten’s teenage daughter died of a cardiac arrhythmia at the end of last year. Portell felt that the death was probably caused by the vaccine. And Casten’s office had been active in encouraging Illinoisans to get vaccinated as soon as possible. “The whole point of me tweeting that was because the vaccines don’t work,” Portell said in a phone call. “You don’t need to believe everything the government tells you. It’s that simple.” Dalton Stokes, the owner of a flooring company in Alaska, yelled at me on the phone for several minutes, arguing that anything he’d done had been done to punish the liberal elite, a group who deserved it. “I want them to hurt a little bit, because they wanted us in jail because we wouldn’t put a mask on,” he told me. He said he didn’t care if this was cruel and that I was probably going to die in an impending civil war.

Then I spoke with Julie Collins, an artist based in Mississippi, who was not a particularly savvy social-media user. She had no idea how one of Ball’s tweets about his son’s death had come across her feed in the first place. And she said she didn’t realize that a tweet she had posted in response—about how those “complicit” in the distribution of the vaccine were responsible for war crimes—looked like part of the pile-on. Her intention, she explained, was to critique the powers that be and to take some of the heat off of Ball’s personal decisions. “He looks like a nice father and this must be a terrible situation for him,” she said. “You’re right; it’s just awful.”

Her surprise underscored something important. While Billy Ball’s story ending up in her feed may have seemed like an accident, it wasn’t. The story was placed there because of the inscrutable machinations of a recommendation algorithm that was trying to guess at what Collins would engage with. It was also amplified by an aggressive anti-vaccine faction that is alert to all kinds of stories of unexpected death—whether on social media or in news reports—and draws special attention to those that come with compelling, exploitable details. These people had particular success with targeting Ball because he’s a journalist (“part of the establishment media,” as Collins put it to me), and apparently a liberal. He had also posted quite frequently in 2021 about the COVID vaccines and expressed his excitement about getting vaccinated. He later mentioned that he’d offered his kids candy after they put on brave faces for their shots. With some retooling, these posts were framed as ominous and damning (or, to the worst trolls, hilarious): The candy became a “bribe,” the excitement about vaccination became “bragging.” His essay for The Atlantic was reframed as “playing the victim.” In this way, like the father whose children lost their mother before Christmas, Billy became less person than trope: Smug liberal. Media elite. And the people who came after him were able to convince themselves that they were doing something defensible—even important.

Research has established that groups in direct opposition to each other are apt to take joy in the suffering of the other side. More recently, social scientists have tested whether this impulse is one of the motivations for online trolling. In 2021, Pamela Brubaker, an associate professor at Brigham Young University, published a paper that identified common motivations among trolls that she and her colleagues had surveyed via Reddit. They found that schadenfreude—or the desire to watch bad things happen to people you dislike—was a powerful predictor of trolling behavior. The people who were motivated by schadenfreude were also likely to think of trolling as justifiable and even productive. “Most of those people actually thought that trolling played some type of functional role in online discourse,” Brubaker told me. They think it’s important to disrupt the conversation by poking holes in arguments or poking fun at others, and they also demonstrate a narcissistic fixation on their own viewpoints and the importance of expressing them. “They’re not thinking about other people. In fact, they may have gone so far as to dehumanize others,” she said. “They’re being selfish … That’s kind of what it boils down to for me.”

The phenomenon of dehumanizing partisan “others” certainly didn’t begin with the internet—it has long been one of the social conditions that precedes political violence. But, at least in the United States, social media became a daily part of most people’s lives during a decade that also saw the gap between the two major parties widen, as ideological differences became more stark and various signifiers became more highly visible and well-known (the MAGA hat, the In This House yard sign).

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As much talk as there has been about whether or not social media has caused political polarization by steering people in certain directions and amplifying certain information with out-of-control algorithms (an assumption that recent scientific research calls into question), it’s useful to remember that even the most basic features of a social website are conducive to the behavior we’re talking about. Though Twitter’s new moderation-adverse management is obviously not helping matters, and Facebook has been far from perfect in its efforts to dissuade harassment, social media is meant for displaying your allegiances and affinities so that people get a rough sense of who you are just by glancing at your profile. If there’s a Ukrainian-flag emoji in her username, she’s a Democrat. He mentioned “the elite” because he is a conspiracy theorist. And from there, depending on what else is going on, maybe it’s also easy enough to say who is good and deserves to let off steam and who is bad and deserves to die.

I first spoke with Salvatoriello in April, after I came across numerous memes he’d posted on the Facebook pages of people who had recently died of COVID-19 (for instance, one in which a cartoon girl says “You can’t fix stupid” and then a cartoon coronavirus says “I can fix stupid”). At the time, he was checking the “Herman Cain Award” page two or three times each day. “For a lot of us, the Herman Cain Awards are very therapeutic,” he told me. He had developed a clear image in his mind of the type of person who was subject to the group’s ridicule.“They are almost universally white, Republican,” he said. “The men have goatees and are hunters and/or motorcycle drivers.” Some of them made racist or homophobic posts in the past, which makes them particularly villainous, but that’s not a requirement for someone to be featured. “If you’re anti-vax, then you’re fair game.”

This dry, almost pedantic expression of what’s fair or deserved was present on the other side as well. When I spoke with a writer named Jennifer Margulis, who had posted a picture of Ball’s son with screenshots of Ball’s tweets about vaccinating his children edited on top of it, she said she’d found the image on Facebook and didn’t have many qualms about sharing it. “You can make the argument—and I think it’s very valid and you might make it in your article—that it’s not fair to speculate about what caused someone’s death,” she told me. But she didn’t feel this way. While she said she didn’t agree with heaping blame on Ball, she was able to split hairs and stand by her post. “I think showing a temporal relationship between two things, which is what I did in that tweet, is appropriate.”

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This logic—by which a person can treat everyone around them as so many bits of evidence in some grand conflict—is more characteristic of online life than offline life. But that doesn’t mean that it’s as simple as blaming social media or the algorithm or even the posters and influencer-hustlers who stir up trouble. Americans make choices when they put themselves in spaces that encourage that line of thinking. They can choose to spend their time in other ways.  

When I spoke with Salvatoriello for a second interview, in July, he said he was no longer checking the “Herman Cain Award” page quite so often. He’d cut back to just a couple of glances a week. “You can’t really sustain that level of frustration and angst and anxiety and maintain a healthy spirit,” he said. “A better therapy is to just not be on social media at all.”