What does Q have to do with outrage? Is Q responsible for Smollet and the race baiting by CNN and the rest of the media? Is Q responsible for the russia fearmongering?
Are you really blaming small fringe youtube channels for the current state of affairs? Most people get brainwashed into hysteria by CNN, MSBNC, Foxnews, NYTimes, etc, not fringe youtube channels.
Conspiracy has been on youtube and the internet forever. It's nothing new and it is fringe.
What's new is that the entire media apparatus has decided to shift blame onto social media for the problems they caused. The extremism isn't on youtube, it's on CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Huffpo, Buzzfeed, TheVerge and all the rest of the media.
They are the ones spreading conspiracies. They are the ones spread lies. They are the ones spreading hate. They are the ones claiming one side are nazis and the other side are commies. They are the ones lying about trump being a putin slave just like 8 years ago some in the media painted obama as a foreign born muslim.
The only ones blaming "Q" are propagandists working for the media or politically affiliated groups. 99% of americans haven't even heard of Q. But 99% of americans have heard the hate-filled divisive propaganda from CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc.
Blaming social media for the current outrage is like blaming mortgage borrowers, rather than the multinational banks for the financial crisis. It's absurd.
Also, don't you think it's a bit odd that outrage has increased since youtube, google, facebook, etc shifted their algorithm to favor CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. I wonder why.
And most importantly, much of the outrage is coming from the left, not the fringe Q crowd. You know the people consuming CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. But we can blame "Q" or "4chan" or "russia" or any of the other nonsense the people pretending to be journalists love to spout.
I'm not sure how you can say that when most of the actual murders (shooting up church congregations; shooting up synagogues; shooting up festivals; driving cars into protestors; etc etc) is coming from the right.
You don't get much more outraged than trying to kill someone.
I'm not talking about journalists getting scuffled at rallies. I'm talking about church congregations getting killed. It's disingenuous to suggest there's any equivalence.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/the-terrori...
> During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism—as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. The FBI estimates that ALF/ELF have committed approximately 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 42 million dollars.
[...]
> Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat. Two of the seven planned acts of terrorism prevented in 1999 were potentially large-scale, high-casualty attacks being planned by organized right-wing extremist groups.
> During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism—as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. The FBI estimates that ALF/ELF have committed approximately 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 42 million dollars.
I'm not much into US politics, but aren't the two mentioned "liberation fronts" left?
> I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media.
I'd argue that this is largely due to the fact that it took many years for social media companies to onboard large portions of the modern world. You may notice a correlation here, but where's the evidence of causality?
> The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general.
I disagree with this. Many social media platforms guide their users to certain types of content automatically using their recommendation engines. As an example, I consume a lot of political content on Youtube, and yet I get recommendations to watch conspiracy theory videos constantly. CNN isn't telling me to watch Q, YouTube is.