let's take a walk down memory lane here, because the problem with Boomer radicalization in particular predates algorithmic methods. https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1111384701103542272

back in 2009, a former advertising executive shot up the Holocaust museum, killing a guard. he was an avid Free Republic poster.

in 2010, a regular poster on sovereign citizen forums flew a plane into the Austin IRS building.

remember Jerome Corsi? he got his start as a Free Republic poster, too.

the Birther movement? the one which, at one point, half of all Republicans believed in? spread by a network of right-wing samizdat.

we started to see signs of widespread radicalization as early as 2012. there were surges in the polls among marginal candidates. at one point in 2012, Herman Cain led. as did Bachmann. so did Newt.

and when it stabilized, Romney had to seek an endorsement from Trump.

after Obama was elected, right wing terrorism took off. the media portrayed it as unconnected to any larger force radicalizing the mainstream right.

72% of Republicans, by 2016, believed that Barrack Obama was not an American citizen.

the reason they believed this was not algorithmic. it was not "news" outlets like WorldNetDaily which had filled its roster with Freepers, and was the first to professionalize what Freep had done for free. it was a network of email forwards which spread tropes which we still see.

we saw conservative email forwards as a joke. they weren't. they were a substitute for news.

think hard about what it means that you have probably encountered "Marine Todd" in the wild. there is a social network densely connected enough that people all over the country know it.

that social network was transplanted intact to Facebook, where Boomers started following right-wing politicians. that was fine, so far as it went, in 2009. you could follow Sarah Palin's page and get unhinged takes on real things which happened.

after 2009, Sarah Palin realized she had a valuable resource: running for VP had made her what we would come to call, ten years later, an "influencer." the UX cost of unfollowing her page was kind of high, so people didn't do it.

their eyeballs could be monetized.

then people realized that you could rig up huge content farms and extract huge advertising dollars from fearful, gullible Boomers. old campaign accounts became new clickbait delivery vectors.

now, Sarah Palin owns one. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/sarah-palin-right-wing-content-farm.html

and the first people to monetize the Facebook incarnation of right-wing samizdat channels? it was the same people who monetized it the last time: Joseph Farah, the publisher of WorldNetDaily, and Floyd Brown, the President of the Farah-founded Western Journalism Center.

his various outlets -- most prominently Western Journalism & Conservative Tribune -- largely consisted of reprints of right-wing email forwards. they were also a pro-Trump vanguard, driving support even as "respectable" outlets attempted to stuff everything back in the box.

but the "respectable" outlets had come unstuck from the base.

we blame Breitbart, but it was only the glossy, high-rent version of the email forward reprinters which dominated Facebook news for the conservative base.

things have not gotten better. https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/antifa-punks-baton-is-no-match-for-patriot-prayer-guys-self-defense-training/

it is worth considering this problem as a sociotechnical issue with no single cause.

if i had to say what i think is happening, it's that increased social graph density among increasingly right-wing seniors allowed a sudden collapse in preference falsification.

we all agree that Birtherism was a racist conspiracy theory.

but remember when that sounded a little weird? like you were accusing huge portions of the country of being racists? remember how it was impossible to confront anyone over that fact?

do you think maybe you were right?

it was understood by Republicans, prior to 2016, that there were certain issues you had to dog-whistle. but Trump already had his base, and it was three-quarters of the party.

and he gave them permission to drop the mask. they embraced the term "Deplorable" pretty quick, right?

the right-wing Internet served as a channel of quiet radicalization for a decade. no algorithms necessary.

what Facebook provided was the knowledge you were not alone in your worst impulses. what Trump provided was permission and the promise that you could take what you want.

anyway, if you've been reading this thread, the good news is that i'm not even sure anymore whether this tweet is true. https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1111447635804766208