Or any ultra radical movement. The internet promotes extreme ideologies, as seen through hyperbolic, overly dramatic headlines and videos that make the front page of Tiktok, YT, news everyday.

Anger and the basest, most thoughtless of emotional responses are those that drive the most """engagement""". Fuck whomever invented and promoted this crap.

Yeah, I recall my friend helping start the ironic flat earth society 20 years ago.

Kooks reinforcing kooks.

Just like in 1939, ...wait. Maybe blaming social media for fascism is a step too far.

But I'm interested to hear what you have to say about that. Why did social media enable fascism now, and why did fascism exist before it?

PFAS chemicals have been used in various industries and products since the 1940s and 1950s.

We now know that PFAS chemicals cause cancer in humans.

Humans have suffered from cancer since ancient times even though PFAS chemicals are a modern invention.

How can that be?

India, Brazil, Russia, China...globally, fascism is some how rising in all these countries.

There are actually a bunch of studies that explore the role of mass media, in particular the radio, in the spread of Nazi propaganda in the years before Hitler came to power.

The radio played a big role in the Rwandan genocide as well.

Mass media was central to fascism because fascism requires the ability to build collective consensus over a broad geography that wasn't easy before mass media. It's hard to otherwise align the morality of millions of people.

I share the concern that social media will be like this, but more potent. And it won't just be a distribution channel, it'll be a breeding ground for the ideas that create extremist ideologies in the first place. It's like the wuhan wet market, but for ideas. The ideas that come from this breeding ground are not necessarily good ideas, just popular ones. And fascism is one subset of bad ideas that have been historically popular.

Democracy was a nice idea until the internet came into existence.

It was never a nice idea, but there is nothing better for the moment

Which is basically a mental illness.

Exactly, I just saw a post today about someone's grandpa barricading himself in his house and fearing the eclipse would kill him. On the comments section everyone was insulting him, treating him like an idiot. I couldn't help but feeling this was not a result of poor media choice as everyone was suggesting but an underlying medical illness.

I really hope mental illnesses would be better treated and that people in very edge cases would spend more time in counseling and maybe less time on the internet.

Also, in general, people are quick to insult others online. Somehow it's easier to degrade someone online than I'm person, and there's less incentive to look for the common ground.

That also can't be healthy.

Linking to a fascist site to downplay the negative effects of fascism is a hell of a move.

Let me guess, your parents are fascist for making you pay rent to live in their basement?