[phpnode]

The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.

[zozbot234]

There was a lot of that silly content in 1980s and 1990s BBS's, as well as on Usenet and the early Web. People could definitely find an audience for it. What we didn't have was "social" media and its pervasive matching of online with IRL identity and social ties.

So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".