3 ms·
One of my side hobbies is tracking and studying online reactionaries--in an effort to understand how their swamps bubble over and they impact society at large I
by eropple 8y ago
One of my side hobbies is tracking and studying online reactionaries--in an effort to understand how their swamps bubble over and they impact society at large I've got eyes and ears on something like 60K accounts and probably 20K real identities behind them across Twitter, Discords, Riot groups, etcetera. (I should say "fascists", though; in my estimation, there aren't many reactionaries around, these days, who wouldn't fit the term.)
I can assure you plenty of people "live through such anger and hate on a daily basis". The Diet Coke version of this is Fox News, where on their hard-news shows they literally hard-cut to commercial when, after a shooting at a synagogue guests so much as mention that Trump et al. encourage racism and anti-semitism. It is systemic and systematic and the way this stuff poisons the brains of the people who are soaked in it is very, very real. We underestimate it at our peril--because the full-on, undiluted thing is a hell of a lot more powerful a drug.