Steve Bannon has spoken about specifically targeting Gamergate for political recruitment, I think the role of Reddit in radicalizing young men is quite important, actually. I don't think you could write a reasonable history of the last 10 years of US politics without reference to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and 4Chan.

To be fair: that doesn't mean social media has any relevance, just that some people on both sides think it does.

Right. Dig into campaign actions and - as an example - it looks a lot like the trump campaign won wisconsin with robocalls more than with social media.

Hard to tell for sure, of course, but the recent blanketing of facebook with political advertising doesn't seem to have achieved that much except for buying Brad Parscale a ferrari.

Social media does presumably have some effect but I'm not sure how you'd tell how much/how little compared to other approaches for reaching people.

Social media is wildly influential. At this point, it is likely more influential than any other form of media. Reddit is the #2 social media platform by traffic in the US, after Facebook.

My feeling is that the world at large underestimates the impact of social media and Hacker news overestimates it. Not sure how to rate the infulential-ness of different media, but Fox News was HUGELY influential to the voters that decided the last presidential election: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-...

I think "worldview media" is a more appropriate term for the phenomenon.

What form it takes isn't as important as the fact that it supplies enough content / entertainment / methods of consumption that one can subscribe to it and have 100% of their bandwidth filled, to the exclusion of competing narratives.

Talk radio was an imperfect expression of this, because radio isn't portable in the same way that app-based social media + mobile devices / Fox News are.

But it's entirely possible to prevent someone from ever being exposed to a contrary narrative, simply by filling all their available time.

Media, generally, catalyzes and facilitates social change, often in bad ways.

That's the central premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag...

I've compiled a related bibliography that gets at other aspects, including social and online media.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

Is there a breakdown by subreddit? I'm curious how popular the adult reddits are.

They didn’t say it was? Ideas don’t reach a single person — someone that follows these forums — and then stop. They continue spreading and they might moderate when they do but they still have some center.

Reddit's advertising tool once said that /r/The_Donald had six million daily unique visitors. Sixty-two million people voted for Trump and sixty-five million for Clinton. Six million isn't a majority, but it's absolutely influential.

Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign digital director, and Dan Scavino, Trump's social media manager, regularly visited the site.