- cross-posted to:
- science@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- science@slrpnk.net
I know most people that were on reddit at the time are fully aware of this and won’t be surprised but don’t dismiss the findings out of hand. It’s important that studies are being conducted and the fact that the finding match our lived experience is still noteworthy.
Did it actually radicalize, or just take the mask off? They may have used vocabularies they always wanted to.
I think there’s a lot to be discussed on the topic but I wouldn’t put much on this methodology.
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Radicalization happens yes, it’s a question of The Donald specifically doing it. It’s not so big that many people will just randomly stumble into it like Fox (which is passive and 24/7). People have to kinda seek the sub out and engage. At that point they were probably quietly, let’s just say, racist. So I put that in the category of mask off. I know people they could do that.
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I did read the portion accessible, I quoted it in my original comment.
When a community allows you to feel comfortable “taking the mask off” and embracing your inner bigot that is radicalization. So yes, The_Donald did radicalize people. Your comment is an attempt to highlight a distinction without a functional difference.
I guess you could define radicalization like that, but I’d define it as taking regular Joe with no hate and you know radicalizing them.
Yeah I think there’s a difference between radicalization and mask off.
“Increasingly” is the key word there, pal.
Adopting is the key word actually. Mask off is revealing it.
There is no one key word. They all kind of intermingle to explain the whole idea. Picking and choosing which word you feel most comfortably explains your own opinion doesn’t make it right.
Honestly, before now, this is what I had implicitly assumed was going on. I’m not American, and I had blocked most of this trash when it was happening, but my impression was that these ignorant people were just “coming out of the woodwork” so to speak.
Of course, fear and hate are learned behaviors, but it’s interesting to me to see that these people were actually being quantifiably radicalized by that website in particular, and they weren’t simply bringing views to the platform that were being established elsewhere.
People are emotional creatures. And in a place where a type of view is being actively promoted, it’s very easy to align those emotions in that specific direction.
An example here on Lemmy is ACAB. It’s anti-police and it posts the bad stuff that’s meant to show ACAB. They might say it shows the truth and people going through All, watching the videos and reading the articles might start thinking, huh cops seem bad. They keep going, read statistics and articles posted by other commenters and driven by this information, they eventually end up saying ACAB. Suddenly, anyone not saying ACAB is complicit, an enemy, a troll, part of the problem etc.
It’s the same for any politically charged social hub. It’s not just people who had the views but lacked a place to vent them, but people who are ignorant on the subject and are radicalized through emotional outrage. Emotional opinions are the hardest to change because the investment in them is the greatest.