Has it occurred to you that radicalization actually happens offline, perhaps even in childhood, due to some kind of real life events, and nothing to do with internet at all?
All of this rooted in meatspace. The so called "social defeat".
How often do you see successful people that have a fullfilling life go on rampages?
Radicalization tends to be a function of getting access to a group of like-minded people who agree with your angry/hostile/prejudiced views while simultaneously being socially cut off from moderating influences. The internet is able to connect isolated individuals with that group of like-minded people.
One of the dangers of Internet access to such is people who only know you online may feel more comfortable with encouraging your radicalization than if it was in person because they aren't in immediate danger, nor at high risk of being asked to participate, etc. It can seem inconsequential to agree with extremist statements. People who might hesitate to agree in person may not hesitate to agree on a discussion board.
There are good and bad things that come out of the relative freedom to speak our minds online. Opportunity for radicalization is one of the bad things that comes of it.
Sure, but if he can't find a group in person that will validate and amplify his views and also can't find such online, he will probably remain some run-of-the-mill uncouth jackass without feeling so strongly about it that shooting up a mall seems like a good idea he should totally act upon.
There have been studies. Radicalization is generally the product of a social environment that magnifies certain views and actively encourages people to become more extreme.
Sure, the human has to physically exist before they can become radicalized. I don’t really follow the point here. It’s still important to figure out where the actual radicalization happens.
Certainly the radicalization may happen offline. But in the cases at hand, it did not. There is a significant uptick in violence associated with online radicalization, and no corresponding uptick in violence associated with offline radicalization. You can say that the role of the internet is overblown, but the evidence is there.
Besides, it's a sort of weird position to take on an a) online forum b) of tech people that the internet does not have a significant role in facilitating communication that would not otherwise happen.
There has been a significant uptick in everything online over the last 25 years because in that time the internet population has grown from 0.5% of the worlds population to over 55%.
All of these shooters have manifestos that describe how they came to believe what they believed.
> You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet.
No, I don't. I specifically said "uptick." This line of argument makes as much sense as showing up in a comment thread about the Capital One breach and saying "You make it sound it's almost like privacy violations didn't exist before the internet." Of course it did, but not at this scale, and we're talking about scale.
Sure, and people may be driven to check out extremist ideology because of IRL emotional injuries or problems, but that doesn't mean the internet aspect is overblown. I've probably met more people through the internet than via casual socialization.
Unlikely. Media technologies are technologies for disseminating ideas. Different technologies lie on different points of the spectrum between one-to-many and many-to-many.
Broadcast television, and radio to a lesser extent, is very close to a one-to-many media. There might be a small handful of national networks that can disseminate ideas, and they can only do so in ways that are easy to detect and control by authorities. In an authoritarian state like the Soviet Union there might be only state-controlled broadcasting and it really was one-to-many. In a free country like the United States, you might end up with 3-4 broadcast networks. That's not enough to get a broad spectrum of opinion, which is why the midcentury Overton window was so narrow compared to today.
Cable and satellite television went closer to many-to-many. (Print is also closer to many-to-many than radio and television, but radio and television are more popular since they don't require the effort of reading or the skill of literacy in order to consume, so the presence of radio and television reduces the impact of print.) This broadens things a bit because then you can watch Fox News, though the biggest reason for Fox News was probably an unmet market niche. The broadcast networks plus CNN, for various reasons (likely the internal biases of the journalists themselves), had drifted to a noticeable center-left bias by the 1990's. This left a massive opportunity for a right-biased news network to capture a rough half of the market that was "underserved" to some extent. Conservative talk radio was a similar story.
Print was somewhat more broad, but even then, there were usually small numbers of "respectable" opinionated magazines you could buy on either side of the spectrum (e.g. National Review, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, etc.) but publication was a big enough hurdle that these outlets often served as moderating voices (e.g the National Review effectively excluding the John Birch Society or Ayn Rand from the "respectable right").
The internet is an extremely many-to-many platform. I mean, I'm just some random idiot you've probably never met and now you're hearing all of my thoughts about something of national importance. That's pretty fucking insane when you think about it. And just like cable, talk radio, and publishing slightly widen the bounds of the Overton Window compared to the broadcast television oligopoly, the internet has done something potentially even worse. I don't think there is a single Overton Window at all anymore. And the old media can't handle this. In another era, this National Review cover alone (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a21e51c08a80431d8b8...) would have completely ended a Republican candidate. In today's era, that man is the President. Similar forces have normalized people like Bernie Sanders, someone who actually existed for a long time but would never have become a national figure in an earlier era.
And yeah, I really think this is all part of the same mechanism. People like Timothy McVeigh were radicalized in person. There aren't that many of him. There are a lot of small scale domestic terror attacks and at times even entire mobs of people (Charlottesville for one example, Portland antifa for another example) who commit acts of political violence. And the more these kinds of events happen, and are publicized, the more this type of behavior becomes normalized, becomes something within the realm of things people think about as something that someone might do in a given situation.
All of this rooted in meatspace. The so called "social defeat".
How often do you see successful people that have a fullfilling life go on rampages?