Instead, anything like resilience is a process. Your friends and your community is part of it. Everyone is suggestible, everyone takes beliefs from associates as well as from experience. Conspiratorial and prejudiced ideas are seductive specifically because of how uncertain the world is. One has to reject such ideas in a way that avoids considering them in terms of "either this is true or this is false" since so many questions well beyond proof either way.
Conspiracy, fear, hate - they all drive engagement better than anything else. And since we all optimize for engagement, guess where things are heading. And no matter how resilient you are, there's some really dark shit out there. Ready to tear down even rather healthy people.
This to me seems like it's the key to all of this, or at least a portion of it that really shouldn't be ignored. As I shared, if my ex had other ongoing issues under the surface, they were never presented and she did a great job keeping the visible symptoms from manifesting for the better part of three years.
Maybe she didn't realize they were there herself, hard to blame anyone for that.
It doesn't seem that remarkable, contentious or incendiary of an idea to wonder if following these blogs and communities infiltrated and started poking at something that was already there, driving a curiosity to dig further, effectively picking at a scab....so to speak. And when the platform responds to your interactions, likes, reshares, searches by pushing more of that in your face, it doesn't seem any more remarkable that someone could find themselves facing mental anguish or other personal/emotional problems that wouldn't have ever otherwise seen the light of day.
While the platform, many more times than not profits from that engagement? I completely agree.
Second, if you think QAnon is relegated to only those who visit 4chan, I have very bad news for you.
What is the situation that makes these seem like a solid choice?
For a long while I was fascinated that people could get caught up in cults. It was very much not the kind of thing I would fall for. So I read a bunch of memoirs from people who had left/escaped cults and eventually it made a lot of sense to me. I would still never fall for one, but I can see how they take advantage of basic human drives and the weaknesses of their particular kind of victim.
Methinks it's because I got it out of the way early on. I definitely have had my own phases for occult, religion, conspiracies, MLM, alcohol, outrage addiction, counter cultural impulses, protests, etc.
Further, I once thought I'd get into journalism, did student radio & TV, wrote for a bit.
I think seeing how the sausage is made, learning the craft, helps one develop an immunity.
Having a contrarian reading list probably helped. For example, Robert Anton Wilson and stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
Robert Anton Wilson is also good, because he presents all this stuff clearly marked as fiction.
My advice is to study the techniques, to better guard against them. This much is obvious, no?
Though illustrative, I acknowledge The Illuminati and the Subgenius stuff are not very accessible.
Thank You for Smoking https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944 and Network https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958 are probably more your speed.