It's happening!
Meanwhile, in this moderate preacher and congregation allegory, the congregation has not left the building, because there is no leader to explain to them why they need to shut the trolls out of their life, so they are sitting ducks to become radicalized.
This is what grandparent was saying afaict - moderating voices leaving the conversation capitulate the space to the radicals.
The moderating voices are tired of explaining to people that the earth is not flat, so they are leaving. So the flat earthers can take to the pulpit.
FWIW my strategy is to build a better church down the road. I don't know if I can make it more appealing than the megachurch dominated by trolls, but I think a lot of people are looking for something different.
1) Exit social media and save yourself. This is the best option
2) With unending patience, choose an individual and just interact with them at a human level till both sides achieve understanding ( no matter how distasteful or difficult the process ). This does not scale
3) Begin to invest in PR, think tanks, media firms, groups and so on to craft a message to sway large groups of people at one go. This scales and what most people are resorting to, and what is creating the problem in the first place.
If everyone did it, it would "scale" pretty well.
>think before sharing
>recycle
>wear seat belts
>be considerate
>stretch
>drink water regularly
>brush regularly
None of this scales, and none of it will ever scale, because humanity is designed to not follow that.
Human beings are an aggregate of all sorts of behavior, ranging from complimentary to those in active pursuit of mutual annihilation.
Any system/solution which expects uniformity in behavior or choice, is dead on arrival.
Unfortunately that leaves solutions that target biology and neural processing/heuristics.
Our businesses and science is actively about hacking brains and influencing choices.
Social media just makes those divides more readily apparent because people now have instant access to those they harshly disagree with. There's also a large amount of issues stemming from rational ignorance due to the sheer amount of data people are being bombarded with, and it's easy to often slip things past people's various filters depending on how you target them and their education levels.
YES, these behaviors must arise in any group of thinking beings.
No, this is not like what happened before.
The Internet and social media dramatically accelerate the creation of new groups and the rate of polarization.
On the forums I am on, I have seen tiny social cracks become ongoing flame wars in the span of a few months. These are fringe opinions, with strong emotional components, become battle lines.
But worst of all, it is that the underlying issue loses all hope of ever being discussed peacefully or maturely.
A valid fringe issue, which would eventually have its day in the Sun, is now a point to test identity
These became issues, when earlier it was solved by the slower pace of conversation and discussion. Things are getting inflamed due to the medium. IT carries little nuance or context, and it amplifies the most acerbic and attention grabbing messages.
It makes things worse in a way human beings and cable companies alone could not.
My fear is all the leaders of the US and Europe who remember the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century are dead. And the power of divisive tribal politics is too tempting to the new generation.
Over time though, moderate preachers were singled out, and in some cases killed, because they didn’t take a stand. This created a chilling effect.
Coupled with incendiary and emotional images (“look at these pictures, look at what they’ve done to our children! You are either with us or with them.”), and no push back or ability to prevent such polarization, extremism grew stronger.
This is the gist of what I remember, it’s been years and many other crises since then.
However I am struck, as to how social media is creating those same dynamics - but now for everything from gender, race, religion, politics, nationality, to brand loyalty and maybe even gaming.
The best solution I saw for dealing with social media was dropping off it altogether.