In a nutshell? Social media and the Internet are amoral tools. Unregenerate man is to blame.

With everyone owning a camera and recording everything, i would say accountability has increased. Even if you use an alias it can still be traced back to you.
It's true that some just avoid polite debate and immediately resort to name calling as if that means anything.
These types of interactions are an intellectual cul de sac.

You have hit on one thing that really bothers me, which is an online world in which anonymity tends to remove accountability. It is one reason I use my real name here. I suppose it makes me a bit less secure, but it also requires that I be accountable for what I say, and I'm willing to practice what I preach. I'm not going to anonymously decry the way in which anonymity hinders accountability. That would be hypocritical of me.

Having said that, however, as I see it, I am ultimately accountable to God for my speech, and that is where my true accountability lies. I take seriously the word of the Lord Jesus, who said to the religious hypocrites of His day:

Brood of vipers! How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things. But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment. (Matt. 12:34-36 NKJ)

So I try as best I can, in reliance on the grace of God, to follow Biblical standards for righteous speech. For what it's worth, and if you are interested, you can see something of what I mean by reading a blog article I once wrote entitled, "Some Thoughts From Proverbs About Our Speech." In it I focus on how we need to be concerned about 1) what we say, 2) how we say what we say, 3) when we say what we say, and 4) why we say what we say.

[reformedbaptistblog.com]

There is a Zen aphorism that says, "Next to enlightenment, nothing is more important than good manners" but it's hard to learn good manners when you don't see any around you. We're not just sad @MichelleD; we're quite lost.

Do you remember when you woukd start a conversation with some stranger at a kegger. the conversation goes south on you and you would come up with a drunken show stopping killer zinger comeback 20 minutes later on a road the opposite directiin from your house. Boy i miss those days. Social media is the place to go to tell that lopsided story so "someone" hears your witty comeback. And they are always nasty. Everyone wants to be churchill at the ball.

Respect. For each other, for our communities, for our institutions. We acknowledged their failures and faults, but understood that people had both good intentions and respect.

That is gone right now from a large segment of society. I think there is a veneer on that past, I don't think it's gone...

How to break through that veneer? No idea...

We were headed towards a divisive country internet or not. Class segregation is part of the story, as well as the decline of manufacturing jobs, then there is the educational system. Globalism had winners and losers. Beyond that people are not bound to gather by institutions such as churches anymore.

The post World War Two era was a historical abnormality. The experience of fighting together bonded the classes and created an environment where everyone could get ahead. We are slowly sliding make into the historical norm of us verses them. The educated "elites" vs the deplorables etc. etc.