This makes an important point that a lot of internet researchers (like yours truly!) have tried to make about online discourse: far from trapping us in homogenous bubbles, social media actually exposes us to *lots* of competing, challenging ideas.
https://twitter.com/risj_oxford/status/1348536119881826306
This is important to understand because we're apt to blame a lack of information, or a lack of exposure to facts, for the existence of this or that extremist group. Fear of "filter bubbles" runs rampant.
But the far-right, neo-Nazis, QAnon, etc. are not the result of a *lack* of access to facts; they result from the *recontextualising* of facts into a different system of meaning.
So, what does that jumble mean? Basically that you can encounter a fact and discard it without ever being challenged by it. To some degree, we *all* do this. Extremists just, generally, have to do it far more.
So, a news article debunking the lie du jour becomes "fake news," et cetera. This is vital to comprehend because there remains an enduring liberal fantasy about education and fact checking as solutions to the neverending problem of white-right identity extremism in the US.
Which pairs with the lie that all Trump supporters *must* be uneducated, etc. Many of the January 6th insurrectionists went to university, however. They're not uneducated, they're telling themselves a specific story that makes their world make sense.
A lot of the right wing alternatives to Twitter are dangerous. Parler's death is long overdue. But they were never *that* successful because the far right loves exposing itself to the left (in every sense of that phrase).
They spin their wheels on Gab et al. because there are no libs to own there. They want to harass people, they want to spread lies on the comments of news stories that otherwise challenge their narratives, they want to spew slurs at the groups they hate.
The issue is not exposure to alternate beliefs. It's their conviction in their own, which is impervious to all reason. Their only way out of this maze is to tell themselves a new story.
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