It's a matter of scale; before social media, small groups would be isolated due to difficulty in "finding" each other. Now it's just a quick google search away.

It's a matter of scale; before social media, small groups would be isolated due to difficulty in "finding" each other. Now it's just a quick google search away. The other part of that "scale" is that these fringe views are presented with the same facade of authority as a more mainstream view. Generally speaking, something like Google will present the search results in a non-biased way... so googling for "flat earth" will bring up links, just as "moon landing" would. So to a naive viewer, "Google" is approving of the idea of a "flat earth", if that makes sense...