[noduerme]

> They would have to literally stand on street corners with megaphones to shout their messages

This is the primary problem. "Speaker's corner" has always been the place for insane people to shout. Social media has elevated it to the mainstream. (And made a handsome profit).

Insanity is contagious. What I mean by that is: Mental instability, FUD, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and simple sociopathic narcissism are viruses. No one who has witnessed 2016-present could doubt that. But anyone who knows about 1932-1945 already understood it.

Individuals with violent and malevolvent personality disorders are very capable of spreading their mentality to others. All they need is a channel. Radio and television, in the wrong hands, were used to mobilize millions of people to their deaths. And suddenly we open a channel for the craziest of crazies, and think their mental afflictions won't affect billions of people around the world?

There is no right to be heard. Over all of human history, being heard by the masses has been an extremely rare privilege. Creating a technology that allows crazy people to be heard is frankly the definition of insanity breeding more insanity. Speech is not the problem. Proliferation is.

[helloworld11]

>Insanity is contagious. What I mean by that is: Mental instability, FUD, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and simple sociopathic narcissism are viruses. No one who has witnessed 2016-present could doubt that. But anyone who knows about 1932-1945 already understood it.

What an implicitly condescending, shitty thing you state so casually: That obviously the only reason Trump won in 2016 is because he "spread" his sociopathic narcissism to others, who also likely happen to be mentally unstable and possibly conspiracy nuts. No chance that maybe, just maybe, millions of people voted for him on their own no less rational volition than those who voted for a frankly terrible democrat candidate like Clinton. No, the Trump voters were just mentally infected, weak minded idiots I suppose?

[noduerme]

I'm not talking about everyone who voted for Trump. His is not the only or even the most important species of insanity that's been allowed to spread like a virus. Yes, people have all sorts of reasons for voting in populist demagogues without needing to specifically buy their insanity wholesale. Trump's madness is a symptom and a vector, a stop on the road between Alex Jones shouting on a corner and Adolf Hitler in a bunker. The door just keeps opening wider, though.

[helloworld11]

Enough with the absurd hyperbole already. Trump's presidency was neither an Alex Jones conspiracy nutfest or an Adolf Hitler madhouse of dictatorship. It was mostly mediocre but hardly worse than many previous presidency. Possibly better than some even. I'm no fan of that guy in so many ways, but he lived up to very few of the insane worst expectations that were created when he just entered the office. The world certainly didn't go to hell because of it. If anyone promoted idiotic unfounded conspiracies during his presidencies, it was the media endlessly harping about Russian collusion in his victory, but never being quite able to provide solid evidence of a single aspect of that particular conspiracy theory. Or the obsessive fixation on the new boogeyman of "misinformation", which suddenly has become a global problem according to many media sources and politicans because, oh god forbid, a candidate that they didn't give their formal benediction to happened to win a major election.