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Now, I’m 16, and I’ve been able to reflect on how I got sucked into that void—and how others do, too. My brief infatuation with the alt-right has helped me understand the ways big tech companies and their algorithms are contributing to the problem of radicalization—and why it’s so important to be skeptical of what you read online.

while a quick burst of radiation probably won’t give you cancer, prolonged exposure is far more dangerous. The same is true for the alt-right. I knew that the messages I was seeing were wrong, but the more I saw them, the more curious I became. I was unfamiliar with most of the popular discussion topics on Reddit. And when you want to know more about something, what do you do? You probably don’t think to go to the library and check out a book on that subject, and then fact check and cross reference what you find. If you just google what you want to know, you can get the information you want within seconds.

I started googling things like “Illegal immigration,” “Sandy Hook actors,” and “Black crime rate.” And I found exactly what I was looking for.

I also learned a metric crap-tonne about how online communities of angry young nerd dudes function. Which is, to put it simply, around principles of pure toxicity. And now that toxicity has bled into wider society.

In a twist on the "1,000 true fans" principle worthy of Black Mirror, any alt-right demagogue who can gather 1,000 whining, bitter, angry men with zero self-awareness now has a self-sustaining full time job as an online sh*tposter.

Social media has been assailed by one toxic "movement" after another, from Gamergate to Incel terrorism. But the "leaders" of these movements, a ragtag band of demagogues, profiteers and charlatans, seem less interested in political change than in racking up Patreon backers.

Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.

The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs

speech in the most extreme manosphere groups on Reddit, known as subreddits, was far more hateful than the speech of a random sample of Reddit users, and more on the wavelength of fringe far-right hate groups like those that frequent the social network Gab. And it’s getting worse. Over time the toxicity score has risen across all manosphere forums.