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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

The term that seems to be used for this is "radicalisation". i.e., someone was just going about their everyday life, and then they were exposed to information that (rightly or wrongly) sent them down a path of developing strong political views and evangelising them.

One thing I always come back to when considering this, is that it's _really hard_ for me to rationalise why this should be true.

I can use the Internet without going crazy (I hope. This is obviously self-classified). I think most people can, but even if that's not true, there's certainly a large set of individuals who _don't_ form insane political views and try to push them on others.

What's different in the individuals that seem to be really strongly affected by taking part in extreme "communities", or are even drawn to them in the first place?

What makes someone want to assume the worst of their fellow man? Where does all this anger come from?

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I wonder if it's a similar psychological effect to that seen in the smoke filled room experiments, where someone is sat in a room and smoke starts coming under the door. If they're on their own, they investigate. If the room is full of actors who treat it as nothing, the one subject of the experiment tends to do nothing also.

It turns out it's really hard for some people (maybe all people?) to go against the flow of a crowd. And if you combine that with the rise of clickbait, learning algorithms and social media, it suddenly becomes really easy to find yourself in a filter bubble surrounded by a very annoyed and consipiracy-believing crowd.

Pretty good theory.

I suppose I'm uncomfortable with it, because it implies that some people just inherently have far less agency than others (disconnected from external factors like appearance, capital, etc), and that has all sorts of far-reaching implications...

I believe this is essentially what is going on right now, and I do believe that these effects are currently the biggest threat to democracy. Fringe opinions and downright stupidity are entering the "mainstream", they are being "discussed" right now on forums like reddit's /r/unpopularopinion.

But I don't believe that censorship are good solutions. Strong moderation is needed to keep a forum interesting and worthwhile reading, but that's a practical issue. Government censorship goes way too far.

There should rather be laws that prohibit the use of certain online marketing tools in political campaigns. For example, it should be a punishable felony to use viral marketing in political campaigns that involves any kind of fake comments, replication bots, deliberately falsified news, or fake accounts not tied to real persons. Maybe these tools should also be prohibited for ordinary marketing - IANAL but I think in many countries they already are -, but they should definitely be strictly prohibited in political campaigns.

Right now, it seems that e.g. in the US almost anything goes in political campaigns as long as no foreigners are involved, and we know from the Cambridge Analytica case that some companies act like mercenaries for hire without any conscience or care for democracy. That's what needs to be addressed, not the lunatics and crackpots on forums who will always exist.

> There should rather be laws that prohibit the use of certain online marketing tools in political campaigns. For example, it should be a punishable felony to use viral marketing in political campaigns that involves any kind of fake comments, replication bots, deliberately falsified news, or fake accounts not tied to real persons. Maybe these tools should also be prohibited for ordinary marketing - IANAL but I think in many countries they already are -, but they should definitely be strictly prohibited in political campaigns.

The issue is around defining what is fake and what is real, and that extremist governments will do their absolute best to twist the meanings of these words to fit their agenda.

Sure, such issues need to be decided by the judicative and a nation's constitutional guarantees for the division of power must ensure that a government cannot abuse them. If a particular government can interfere with or directly influence the particular decision of a judge, then it's probably too late to save democracy anyway.

In that case there is no need to abuse laws about political campaigns, though, it suffices to put political opponents into prison and/or take away their rights to be elected, as happens in countries like Turkey and Russia.

The anger has always been there, and we're seeing more and more of it on the internet, as more and more people are getting online.

Combine that with the fact that mental health issues seem to be on the rise, the fact that previously isolated lunatics now are able to talk to each other and validate their thoughts through various filter bubbles, and we end up with a pretty bad mess.

In the past without online communities, no one is there to egg them on. Most people around them will just see them as crazy and ignore them.

Slowly their radical beliefs peter out and that’s the end of it.

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