Letting people with abhorrent beliefs assemble with one another and commiserate on the awful things they believe... I mean I don't think I'd go so far as to say it's responsible for our current historical moment, but it certainly isn't helping it. The primary disadvantage of believing terrible, anti-social things is you would be ejected from social groups, be them communal or familial. That's not to say that racism didn't exist before the internet of course, it absolutely did; but racism and sexism were both on society scale improving over time, because those beliefs would cost you: they would cost you spouses, they would cost you children, they would cost you friends, in extreme cases they would cost you jobs and potentially even open you up to legal trouble.

And it still does, but it's less effective, because various flavors of cretin now have online spaces where they can meet like-minded people and nurture those beliefs, and worse still, all of those spaces reward extremism as any social media site does: subtle, balanced views are not incentivized at all, and you get the most social attention for saying the most outrageous thing in the space. We all know this, like maybe you've never thought about it before, but I'd wager almost everyone on this board has had this experience over one thing or another, even benign nothing issues.

And all of that is before we even get to the subject of things like influencers peddling YouTube videos, TikToks, or whatever to amplify those beliefs for their own profit. Whether they "really believe" these things is irrelevant frankly; in either case, people who believe these things see people being paid to represent their (wrong) ideas which lends them legitimacy.

And now we just have little bespoke engines of radicalization humming away all over the internet in the little shadowy corners, whipping people up into a lather about whatever dumbass thing they googled way back about how they can't get a girlfriend or whatever, and there seem to be a lot of spree shootings now for some reason, totally disconnected I'm sure.

Like the problem with this Libertarian "as long as you're not hurting anyone" is that it leaves a wide open loophole in there about hurting yourself, and while in many cases hurting yourself doesn't lead to anyone being harmed apart from yourself, as I keep saying: No one is an island, if you harm yourself in certain ways, you are absolutely a risk to other people.

Multiple white supremacist mass shooters have been 4chan users.

4chan cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating a 4chan thread during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...

The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...

The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...

Stop whitewashing 4chan's history.

I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.