Let's take it from the top

Disclaimer: I KNOW “liberal” and “leftist” aren’t the exact same by definition. Sue me. I’m using a colloquial tone today.

I happened to be in the right circles at the right time to watch a generation of boys and young adults get radicalized in real time in the internet forums and gaming communities. This was a concerted effort from multiple groups–not really working with each other, but certainly working in tandem. It suited the far right groups and Russian troll farms and other similar groups just fine to be doing the same thing for a while, because what they were doing worked.

I watched as it progressed from gaming forums and places like 4chan and 8chan and kiwifarms to mainstream YouTubers like PewDiePie to people like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan. Online users originally flooded the scene with “edgy” humor that crossed the line to genuine bad-faith jokes (hate speech and threats and old Nazi propaganda about girls, blacks, Jews, gays, you name it) but was protected by the defense of “it’s just ironic” or “it’s just edgy humor”.

Okay, edgelords. You can make that argument.

But the humor you repeat becomes engrained. Irony turns genuine. Jokes become patterns. Patterns become habits. Habits become worldviews. And then you get pulled into other things through the edgy memes your content creators share. And then you’re getting interested in technofeudalist philosphy, and the great replacement theory, and inceldom, and the divine right of kings, and the Crusades being not a bad idea actually, and anti-wokeness, and the manosphere, and the deep state, and straight up conspiracy theories.

And then we end up with Gamergate. And then we end up with Pizzagate. And then we end up with QAnon. And then we end up with the conspiracy theories spreading from the teenage boys, Britebart, Storm Front, foreign bot farms, trolls, and the far right to millions and millions of regular-adults in the United States.

And then we end up with all this.

Before I go on, I’m going to point to one of the most comprehensive, clear-sighted YouTube video playlists I’ve ever seen, which I’ve been trying to get people to watch since 2018. It’s 26 videos long. You don’t have to watch all of them, but by God you should watch some of them. They lay out what’s been happening in our lives. It’s everything I watched happen starting from about 2013-now, starting with my friends and ending with the majority government of the United States of America.

The pipeline is complex. It’s also very simple.

Consider chunk of population. Identify vulnerabilities. Become their friend. Normalize what shouldn’t be normalized. Escalate.

We’ve seen this song and dance before. But in previous iterations of this, we’ve never before had tools like the internet, and most importantly the internet changing from being a place you’d go to visit certain things to being a place that is in front of you, in your hand, in your pocket, in your car, in your church, in your bed, in your kitchen, in your workplace, in your school, in your brain in your brain in your brain.

The internet used to be a place. A digital place, but a place. You opened a web browser, usually, and went to a certain website. You’d close the page when you were done. Now the internet is with all of us 24/7 through our smartphones and other similar devices. And in conjunction with the rapid proliferation of smartphones around our populace, websites became fenced in enclosures that we use as apps. It’s not a dip-in, dip-out thing anymore. You open the app, and from that moment on, that app’s job is to keep you in the penned enclosure for as long as humanly possible. It uses gambling tools, it uses psychology studies, it uses your brain against you in every way possible. Your attention is money, and your brain, and its functioning, are just collateral damage.

And the content that gets your attention the most, the content that gets you to click and save and repost and share, is the content that gets an emotional reaction. And that content, with our current unregulated algorithms, is escalated more and more and more and more until every headline from every news source is sensational, every article is written to grab attention, every statement is written to be more inflammatory and shocking than necessary, every graphic is designed to act like a billboard for outrage.

And we get hooked. And we get stuck.

We’re fish on lines and we’re so sedated and pacified by our bubbles of content that feels good and right to our worldviews that we don’t fact check. We trust our content creators. We live in our bubbles, right, left, whatever, and the only content we see that goes against them are carefully curated to elicit as much outrage from us as possible and drive us further into our own sphere and worldview. And it’s been happening at speed, at scale, for years and years.

We had a chance to change this somewhat after the huge Cambridge Analytica scandal, and after every single thing that’s come out about the social media companies and their algorithms purposefully manipulating us and leading to harm. No one changed the rules or put on safety rails, so it’s all kept escalating.

And now, over the past couple of years especially, I’m seeing the exact same misinformation-sharing trends that captured the slow-brewing alt-right pipeline about a decade ago. And it’s happening on the left.

Now, as of May 2025, every single week I can find multiple examples of claims, headlines, and various posts that go viral in liberal circles online (Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, you name it) that are either very skewed/cherry-picked or just straight up misinformation that wasn’t fact-checked. It’s happening on the right, yes, constantly, as it has been for years. But in 2023-2024 there was a surge of it among liberal users online like I’ve never seen before.

There are a few problems here.

1. Every single thing that goes viral among the non-right users online gives the right-wing users in the U.S. so much concrete, real fodder to point at and go “See! See! They’re out of touch with reality! They say we do that but it’s really them! Look at the lying liberals, they’re manipulating the facts and inserting falsehoods to trick you!” And that kind of point re-entrenches all of them, and sometimes wins people to their side who are sick of the unique brand of purity politics and “discourse” and cancel culture that’s infected the liberal internet just like it infected tumblr in real time in the 2010s.
2. Every time users get riled up and share and re-share these posts/headlines/claims, they’re getting used to the way the headlines make them feel. They’re getting desensitized to the way that their emotions are used against them, and they’re getting used to accepting and re-sharing information without verification just because it’s from a source that’s on their “side” and it neatly matches the expectations and biases they have for what information might come out of xyz event. This is how you get people to believe every headline that yanks their heartstrings and react before they think critically or fact-check. This is how things work on the right at this point in time. Now it’s been infecting the left, too.
3. Every single time more liberal news outlets participate in sharing these kinds of “facts” and headlines without properly checking them, they’re demonstrating two things: One, they’re committing the sin of blindly trusting and being willing to share whatever will get them views and interaction. Two, they aren’t trustworthy, just like the far-right keeps trying to get everyone to believe. And it has the added problem of further reducing the entire populace’s confidence in traditional media, which is already in the pits and heading downward.

I don’t know how to fix this, given how much everyone’s reading comprehension and ability to fact-check anything has gone down the drain in recent years. The more something outrages you or sounds “right” for what you expect, the more you should mistrust it until proven otherwise.

So, so many posts and headlines and talking points among liberals and leftists now are engineered to drive outrage and to create tribalism. It’s being encouraged, rewarded, carefully cultivated and grown.

On the far right, accelerationists are working hard. On the far left, accelerationists are working hard. In Russian bot farms, they’ve planned out for years and years how they’ve been working to radicalize and polarize both factions and drive as much of the U.S. American populace to:

1. Distrust each other.
2. Assume bad intent before anything else.
3. Distrust the media.
4. Isolate into information silos.
5. Polarize each other.
6. Collapse the system from the inside via a populace that is so driven by emotional outrage and mistrust that they can’t work together and no longer want to even try.

It’s sure succeeding!

The right is being taught that liberals are as evil as the devil himself, everything is a lie, and the deep state is everything.

The left is being taught that conservatives are as evil as the devil himself, progress is the enemy of perfection, and cooperation is a useless scam unless everyone works together for the most perfect goal.

Both are being taught to not trust real people in their lives, to not trust the government, and to not trust the media.

Everyone is sinking into smaller and smaller echo chambers with more and more misinformation. A false headline claim like the 14,000 babies will die in 48 hours that went blazingly viral in liberal and leftist circles this past month may seem more innocent than something on the scale of “the U.S. is run by lizard people and Wayfair furniture listings are actually selling girls as a human trafficking ring”, but that’s false. Both are misinformation. Both create mistrust. Both spread lies. Both lead to the other side being able to vilify and demonize the one that spread them. Both polarize. Both serve as confirmation bias fodder for the side that DOES believe them without fact-checking (or using common sense).

When you’re able to believe anything that flies past your eyes online so long as it comes from the right source, you’re lost. It’s over. You’d do better to just get off the internet entirely and live in a cave, because you can no longer be trusted to share things that are true, only to share things that you think are true. And that’s a HUGE difference.

My final point:

The far-right propaganda and the far-left propaganda use different angles and flavors, but they’re both accomplishing the same things. Now, in 2025, we have the far-right hating Jewish people via the usual old alt-right conspiracy theories about “the Jews”, but now, after a several-year-long slow ramp up, and a one-year-long rapid increase, the far-left is circling around to hate Jewish people as well. Gaza, somehow, is propaganda for both sides. And as expected, as always happens, it’s escalating to IRL attacks and violence. Because both sides are being radicalized towards hatred and violence, no matter how anyone tries to dress each side up as “justified” and “moral” and “in the right”.

Foreign enemies and internal factions both want us polarized, scared of each other, and mistrustful to a fault. The more they can get us to lose the last shreds of our trust in traditional media and in our fellow citizens that live in the same country, the easier it is for an authoritarian government to fill that void and the hard it will be for us to possibly dig ourselves out.

At this point, we’re accelerating a lot of the work of a repressive or autocratic regime ourselves, and we don’t even have the full force of one of them truly beating down on us yet! If nothing changes, if we don’t become more aware, if we don’t start checking our own reactions, outrage, and responsibility for the information we share, I don’t think we’re going to make it out of this decade intact. And this process is a bellweather for the entire internet-connected first world nation gang. This isn’t a minor problem. It’s systemic. We have to change.