I'm pretty sure /r/the_donald started out as a joke and slowly turned real at some point. I still don't quite understand what happened. It would make an interesting investigation.
This is perhaps the most ironic thing.
This will likely lead to another push for controlling the internet/media a la net neutrality, because we all know people can't be left to do their own research, use any amount of discernment, or have an alternative viewpoint.
Bring forth the gulags, the people need jobs...
Instead, it benefited the likes of Netflix at the expense of the telecom industry. It also put the internet in a legal classification that would allow more government control of speech, though this had not yet been much of an issue in practice.
None of the above seems to have made much of a difference to end users.
It would be great to have a new sort of net neutrality, focused on end users. A nice thing about the end of the old one is that a new one could replace it, giving people what they mistakenly thought they had.
How unfortunate that this generation's social scientists are interested only in grinding and swinging the axe in one political direction. ;-)
There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.
I can only guess that things must have gone downhill when the site was taken over by Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has some pretty right-wing political views. That said, there's also a kind of natural affinity in the humiliated-outsider-mentality that 4chan had that fits with Nazism in a way that I feel has become more and more clear in recent years.