[TechBro8615]

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to extrapolate this finding to other areas of society where a small percentage of people write their opinions and then a much larger percent of people read them, eventually shaping aggregate opinion independently of any opinion held predominantly by “lurkers.”

How many elections have been shaped by 4chan, Reddit, and Facebook comments? There have been a few studies on this, eg in 2016 [0] and 2018 [1] which found results that probably will not shock you.

Personally, this might be confirmation/proximity bias, but I believe the effect of small internet communities is severely underestimated by the public and political consultants. This is an area that needs a lot more study, not so that we can stop it, but so we can raise public awareness of how memes spread and give people the tools to think critically without falling into the self-reinforcing cognitive traps that arise from filtering information with poor heuristics.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12512v1

[tediousdemise]

> a small percentage of people write their opinions and then a much larger percent of people read them, eventually shaping aggregate opinion independently of any opinion held predominantly by “lurkers.”

ELI5 brainwashing