this is a :a-guy: post
So my grandma couldn't live alone anymore and she moved into my parents house about a year ago. Her new bedroom doesn't have cable. Her media diet used to be like 90% TV and 10% internet. Now it's reversed.
She's 90 years old and just a conventional methodist.
What probably happened is she searched youtube for gospel music to do crosswords by. 100,000 iterations of the algorithm later she believes in ancient aliens, crises actors, millenarianism, all of it.
Same thing probably happened in rural communities who got the full internet all at once. They didn't get it by degrees, dial-up alta vista, to learn years of bullshit filtering heuristics.
It’s sad how reactionaries will seize on otherwise good but uninformed people with some highly specific stance (ie. antivax) and appeal to that to sucker them into blindly supporting all of their other reactionary stances. I’ve seen so many people get plucked away like this
Yeah happened to one of my best friends (gamer gun enthusiast)