Why is there hostility towards centrists on social media?

I’m in two minds about centrists really - on the one hand they lean towards the political right, and on the other hand they lean to the political left, I just never know where they stand on any given topic. Pick a siiiiiide dammit 🥵

Leaving Iraq aside, his politics were centrist. My sympathies with the policies that won him a landslide in 1997 still stand.

And by the way, concensus is the political holy grail. If you can get concensus, nothing will ever beat it! I get the feeling thats never occurred to you.

I don't really care about hostility on the internet in general. I don't take the medium seriously. I am going to give my opinion on something and read about some new subject for me, I don't require validation for my own self confidence, though the interactions can be thought provoking and it's good to try on different hats. It's a safe place , due to anonymity , a sandbox to learn what's happening and how other people might think but it's not "real life" for me. Real life is the 30 seconds in the voting booth which is often very different to what you will see online. (You see all the shock and surprise in the results aka who the f*ck voted for that shower again!). It's very different from what social media would have you predict.

I also find all the framing and identity to be nonsense, pushed by people who desire a simplified categorized organisation of inconsistent humans. It very rarely fits, people do not need to identify with these made up notions. I never had any group loyalty in school either. In fact I have an aversion to groups and identity. It's just another form of control and a loss of freedom.

Isn't "I'm alright jack" the opposite of ideology. Like let's forgo the greater good, I only care about myself?

I think that's how most people vote, they decide what's best for them, what might put more money in their pocket, improve schools if they have children or protect pensions if they are about to retire etc. People just vote 100% selfishly and may make some vain attempt to appear consistent to some ideology in hindsight. It's no great mystery.

On social media I think it's more likely that far-Left and far-Right people simply don't encounter each other very often. A person on the far-Right, for example, is going to find themselves quickly blocked from a far-Left persons Twitter feed, Facebook page and so on.

To some extent they spend all their time in echo chambers and as a result the only people left to fight with are themselves and any "centrists" that still think they can talk some sense into these extremists.

Some groups even have their own jargon to facilitate this behavior. Concepts like dog-whistling where the person you want to fight with or smear or bully or whatever is going on hasn't actually said something bad so you claim they've used some secret code that can only be understood by the far-Right to say a bad thing. A dog-whistle. Of course, they never consider that if you can hear the dog whistle then you are the dog.

If I spend all my days on social media fighting my political opponents but also relentlessly blocking my political opponents, then it makes sense that over time I would need to look harder for people to fight and if I did get in a fight then it's more likely to be with someone who hasn't previously overstepped enough for me to block them yet. So that leaves the choices of attacking centrists or getting into some good old in-fighting.

Over periods of years or even decades the fights will eventually break out over smaller and smaller things and the targets will be people further away from the extremes and closer to the middle. If the most extreme online fascists or anti-fascists ever met each other in real life I bet they'd just run away from each other. "Punch a Nazi" might as well mean "find someone weaker than you who won't stand up for themselves and use an accusation of being a Nazi as an excuse to bully them." Same thing holds true for the other side. They will pick weaker and easier targets, usually over the most mundane things. Like an actor makes one silly comment in one interview, one time and the "anti-SJW" brigade will try to bring down Armageddon on that person.

The last 2 people who told me they were 'centrists' were without doubt right-wing (imo)

So is that not the issue?