[wayoutthere]

This is it. People who are “very online” are a small percentage of the population — one that is almost the polar opposite of people in meatspace. They tend to be a lot more isolated from society and radicalized by the echo chamber they exist in.

Those with strong offline relationships tend not to have time to participate in these communities enough to influence them.

I find the media is particularly egregious in giving these voices an outsized level of influence because journalists are lazy and source stories on Twitter and try to manufacture drama and page views. But this media is consumed by “less online” people which contributes to the view that those opinions are more prevalent than they really are.