Having been an early user of 4chan back in late 2003, from what I saw, the tone shift of nazi stuff just being edgy belligerence for the shock value to people saying “no really, this is my serious political ideology” really got traction somewhere around 2012-2014. Prior to that, there was still pushback. Much like how the idea of having a “waifu” was originally a derisive joke, but somehow turned into actual practice.
This coincided with a few things, massive increase in internet use, raids having increased 4chans notoriety, but most importantly it was the timeframe when Russia prepared for and invaded invaded crimea, which included ramping up “active measures” to shift conversation with troll farms/propaganda. 4chan (and later, 8chan, which had a huge population of boomers buying into “qanon” nonsense) became an ideal host to try to amplify disruptive propaganda.
I didn’t quite notice what was going on, since by that time I was mostly only on select boards like /tg/ or alt chans like operatorchan, but the Russian influence became obvious in the lead up to the 2016 election.
And it wasn’t just nazi stuff, it was all sorts of bullshit like Marxism, esoteric magic and conspiracy shit that was being thrown around to see what stuck. And they were active across every social media site. Though as bad as 4chan was, I’d argue russian presence on Facebook and twitter was especially harmful and far reaching. They didn’t even need to be subtle or target groups: https://qz.com/1284222/russian-facebook-ads-were-barely-targ...