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The in-your-face stuff you saw online in an ugly standoff with racial overtones at a London grocery store?

Get ready for more of it, not less.

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Hair-trigger emotions on hot topics such as immigration, enflamed by a federal-Ontario funding fight over the influx of asylum seekers into Canada, have created a climate where some people can unload in public at the drop of a dime, one expert says.

And with people constantly being filmed in a digital world, even if they don’t know it, it’s inevitable that clashes like the one that went down at a London Sobeys store on Tuesday night hit social media almost instantly.

In the London case, a red-shirted man who appeared to be blocking another man from leaving the store – while calling him an “illegal alien” – seemed not to notice that someone behind him was filming him on a cellphone.

“There’s the dimension of living in this kind of panopticon, where we are being potentially filmed and recorded at any moment . . . not only from other users potentially filming it, but obviously there are more and more security cameras,” said Thierry Plante, a media education specialist at MediaSmarts, a non-profit digital media literacy group.