That said, I think, historically, a substantially part of the reason mentally people usually are harmless is because they can see their grasp on reality is shaky. Others have generally not shared their delusions and so no one validates their desires to lash out at those who they imagine have harmed them.
The Internet seems to have changed that - communities of people who share pathological illusions seem to have come together and produced a still small number of horrendous crimes - the "incel movement" being one very visible example.
These folks might well in dangerous (to others) gray area between debilitating insanity and approximate sanity. Pathological enough to embrace problematic ideas and functional enough act on them.
Now that has changed, and everyone, however disorganized and deprived of resources, can publish their every thought. People who think they’ve been “gang stalked” and people who think that the government is behind contrails all have a megaphone to the world. As a “bonus” they also are able to just type their delusions into Google and find sites to confirm and expand them. The same network effect that connects hobbyists and enthusiasts of rare things around the world does the same for people with delusional frameworks.
It also does the same for Holocaust deniers, and general shitheads.
It's hard to phrase these things. I wouldn't say people were less confident in the delusional beliefs. Rather, an isolated delusional person has less general confidence - the world is "against them" and their relative weakness relative to the world is fairly evident.
Overall, success at doing horrible things requires some of the same mix that success at doing constructive things needs; confidence, support, plans and ideas. The process you describe and we all can see helps in all those things.
A recent example that comes to mind: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18049311
This post raises a lot of questions that I don't have a good answer to.
If this is Kiwi Farms, though... https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
Some people don't really care what cause they get behind so long as they get to bully people and raise hell. They'd be anarchists, leftists, alt-right, whatever, so long as they get to beat up people and set things on fire.
This is not to say both political extremes are identical, but that certain people will latch on to any group that will tolerate their behaviour.
[edit] sounds like kiwifarms is a 4chan-type trolling/alt-right site and simply got tumblr to also attack these poor folks by making up stories about them being animal abusers.
"Still, this should be mundane. People say a wrong thing on the Internet. It happens.
The trouble is, young "progressives" at the moment are falling all over themselves to be part of an expulsion — to root out and help exile some secret predator hiding in plain sight.
So if you have a target whose life you want to ruin for funsies, all you need to do is dig through their history for some circumstantial evidence, concoct a vaguely related story that makes them sound horrible, and circulate it in a callout post.
The problem, then, is not that someone pulled a story about Styx out of their ass. The problem is that Kiwi Farms is a well-oiled machine for producing hundreds of such stories, and the one about Styx is now listed on a Tumblr somewhere under a heading like "animal abuse", calling me a "known literal animal abuser". Because someone can't read Wikipedia."
Sounds like someone found these stories, misinterpreted them (wilfully or not) to sound like abuse, then got tumblr all riled up to harass them. I suppose the initiator wasn't necessarily from that space, but it certainly seems like tumblr/progressives are taking part in the harassment.
(I'm saying "allegedly" here because, honestly, I haven't had the time to dig into fact-checking the story. I don't believe the author is lying, however.)
The whole “someone can’t read Wikipedia” excuse is exactly the same as what trolls themselves say.
The common theme being you suffered so you deliver 100x suffering in return in cruel and unusual ways. Redefining karma as cold revenge, being an innocent victim who is a victim but no longer innocent.
This doesn’t even come close to healthy. It usually takes therapy to get there in such a case but when you revel in the pain...
"Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it."
"When you’re in business, you get even with people that screw you. And you screw them 15 times harder."
Anecdotally, I was screwed once in a business. I didn’t retaliate. Same thing happened a second time because this person knew I wouldn’t react.
I won’t let it happen again.
Edit:: to be clear, I’m talking 7-figure screwed, not “this person was mean to me”.
There's a difference between not letting someone take advantage of you and spending significant time repaying every perceived slight 10 fold. Even iterative prisoners dilemma shows that without forgiveness a tit for tat strategy dissolves into an endless cycle of vengeance.