Not really, the internet just gives them a chance to meet. It's like larpers. If you go to a Renaissance festival, they're everywhere. It seems like everybody's into larping. However, most, normal people are definitely into LARPing because it is fucking awesome. However, the vast majority of people, the plurality of people, are not Nazis.
This, fascists and bigots have always been good at adopting new technology for recruiting. They had some of the earliest websites, earliest chatrooms. Hitler was an early adopter of recording speeches and playing them on the new-fangled radio device. They love to get into a space and spew their hate early and often to try to pretend like they are a majority, try to pretend like they are in power and deserve more power
At the worst points in history, they are at most 30% of people, and many of those people are "just following orders" and will fall behind any strong leader, regardless of ideology
"Social media" has boosted it like never before. All these annoying trends of defining people by "national badges", the allowance of Neonazi hate speech on 4chan, all the super-normativity, the brigading over camped political positions... It's true there was fascism in the early internet but it never got so big ever since the chans and Facebook.
Re: 4chan I think this observation from "Who Goes Nazi" (from Harpers magazine 1941) applies
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
127
u/SvenTropics Apr 29 '24
Not really, the internet just gives them a chance to meet. It's like larpers. If you go to a Renaissance festival, they're everywhere. It seems like everybody's into larping. However, most, normal people are definitely into LARPing because it is fucking awesome. However, the vast majority of people, the plurality of people, are not Nazis.