Originally Posted by The Batlord

If the European perspective is that the cream rises to the top if we all just talk it out like adults then no wonder you people can't keep Nazis out of your parliaments. The social media echo chambers certainly suck but they are a symptom of polarization, not a root cause and blaming radicalization on itself is a typical liberal viewpoint that ignores material analysis.

If there weren't material conditions that were leading people to look for answers why their life and the world sucks so much then Twitter, Youtube, Fox News, talk radio, etc wouldn't have an audience to wind up. But with every financial crisis the elite class consolidate more and more capital and the market share for everyone else shrinks and shrinks and people get more and more desperate for any analytical lens that makes sense to them.

Worrying about cancel culture and echo chambers as villains isolated from any deeper, more holistic analysis is just simping for the status quo, and blathering on about the free exchange of ideas is ignoring how and why these radical ideas develop in the first place. They develop because people's needs aren't being met and they are angry and emotional, and they often come to their conclusions via anger and emotion with help from somebody who knows how to direct their anger and emotions. It's a marketplace of ideas in the same sense as any marketplace functions on cold reason and logic (hint: they don't).