Well I suppose it's a theory ... but I'd guess they were not that familiar with the 00s, when places like Facebook that had poor moderation at the time (they didn't employ anything like a realistic number of moderators) started to create concern for some people / parents. Then there was a movement to change the nature of the web and [1] [2] signalled the death of hearty debate ... it was actually still ok if one declared their name and braved being snatched up in the night if they annoyed the wrong people. Of course it aimed to stop certain people that would blow off steam after work by ruthlessly abusing people for laughs - but down the track with forum and social media hosting software slowly having to change their TOS to comply with US law, it also gave blow hard pretentious idiots a platform they could not be greatly challenged to rant a bunch of BS facts with little online consequences.
[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680
[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...
