The Internet Lets the Dumbest People in America Find Each Other.

Before the internet, every town in America had them. The guy at the end of the bar who thought the moon landing was faked. The woman in the break room who swore the government was hiding aliens. The neighbor who bought every tabloid at the grocery store checkout and believed every word. Before the internet, grocery stores used to sell these trashy magazines at the checkout counter filled with fake headlines designed to trick stupid people into buying them. Headlines like “Woman Gives Birth to Alien Baby.” And people bought them. Eagerly. Repeatedly. Without a shred of skepticism. Everyone knew who these people were. They were the gullible ones. Not very bright. Not all there mentally. And most people just laughed it off because it didn’t matter. These people were harmless. They were scattered across the country in random towns with no way of connecting to each other. There was no infrastructure for stupidity. No network. No platform. No way for the guy in Ohio who believed in alien babies to find the woman in Texas who believed the same thing. They were isolated. And isolated gullible people are just local entertainment. Sad, a little funny, and ultimately irrelevant. Then the internet happened. In 2001, legal scholar Cass Sunstein at Harvard University published a book called Republic.com that predicted almost exactly what was about to happen to American democracy. Sunstein had spent years studying how people consume information and how groups form opinions. What he found was unsettling. When people have the ability to choose their own information sources, they don’t seek out the most accurate ones. They seek out the ones that already agree with them. And when they find other people who share their beliefs, something dangerous happens. They don’t moderate each other. They radicalize each other. Sunstein called it group polarization. The principle is simple and devastating. When like-minded people talk only to other like-minded people, their views don’t stay the same. They get more extreme. The group doesn’t pull people toward the middle. It pushes them toward the edges. The most extreme voice in the room gains the most social currency. And everyone else moves in that direction to keep up. Not because they’re thinking harder. Because they’re thinking less. The group is doing the thinking for them. Before the internet, this process was limited by geography. You could only talk to the people around you. And the people around you were diverse enough, by accident of proximity, that you were constantly encountering people who disagreed with you. You had to deal with the neighbor who thought your alien baby theory was idiotic. You had to sit next to someone at work who rolled their eyes when you brought up your conspiracy. That friction kept people tethered to reality. Not because they wanted to be tethered. Because they had no choice. The internet removed that friction entirely. For the first time in human history, gullible people could find other gullible people instantly, across state lines, across time zones, by the millions. They could form groups. They could create communities. They could talk to each other all day, every day, in spaces where nobody ever disagreed with them and nobody ever challenged them. And exactly what Sunstein predicted would happen, happened. They got more extreme. They got more confident. They got louder. The tabloid readers who used to believe in alien babies started believing the election was stolen. The people who used to think the government was hiding UFOs started thinking the government was trafficking children. The scale of the delusion grew because the network that supported it grew. And the network grew because the technology made it effortless. Sunstein updated his warnings in 2009 with Going to Extremes and again in 2017 with #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Each edition more urgent than the last. By 2017 he was describing what he called “information cocoons” and “echo chambers” where citizens receive only information that confirms what they already believe, never encountering anything that might challenge or correct them. He warned that this fragmentation wasn’t just bad for individuals. It was destroying the shared reality that democracy requires to function. But it wasn’t just the people finding each other. The platforms were actively pushing them together. In 2019, Facebook’s own researchers created a fake user account to study how the platform’s recommendation algorithm treated a new conservative user. The experiment was called “Carol’s Journey to QAnon.” Carol Smith wasn’t a real person. She was a test account. The researchers gave her some basic conservative interests and then watched what happened. Within two days, Facebook’s algorithm began recommending QAnon groups. Within five days, the account’s feed was flooded with what the researcher described as extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content. Nobody asked for it. Nobody searched for it. The platform’s own recommendation system, the same system designed to keep users engaged and scrolling, took a brand new account and steered it directly into a rabbit hole of violent conspiracy theories. Carol Smith didn’t go looking for extremism. The algorithm delivered it. These findings were among thousands of pages of internal documents later disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. The documents revealed that Facebook had known for years that its recommendation tools were pushing users into extremist groups. They studied it. They documented it. They understood exactly how it worked. And they did almost nothing to stop it because the engagement metrics were too good. Renee DiResta, then the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, put it plainly when she reviewed the internal documents. Facebook didn’t just allow a cult to form on its platform. Facebook helped facilitate a cult. And this wasn’t a one-time glitch. The body of Facebook’s internal research consistently found that recommendation tools pushed users into rabbit holes, increasingly narrow echo chambers where violent conspiracy theories thrived. At Facebook’s scale, even a small percentage of radicalized users translated to millions of real people being funneled toward extremist content by a machine that was optimized for engagement, not truth. This is what Sunstein warned about twenty years earlier. Not just that people would choose to surround themselves with agreeable information. But that the technology itself would do the sorting for them. That the architecture of the internet would make it easier to be radicalized than to remain informed. That the path of least resistance would lead directly to extremism. And that’s exactly what happened. The tabloid readers found each other. Social media and the internet didn’t just feed them and amplify their nonsense. It gave them platforms to connect with one another. It gave them communities. It gave them leaders. It gave them an identity. The same people who would have believed in an alien baby in 1995 now believe the election was stolen, vaccines have microchips, and a billionaire con man is fighting for them. The people didn’t change. The technology did. The grocery store tabloid just became a Facebook feed. And the algorithms didn’t just show them the content. The algorithms found them more people who believed the same things, then pushed all of them further toward the edges, just as Sunstein said they would. A group of gullible people who only talk to other gullible people doesn’t get less gullible. It gets more confident. More extreme. More organized. And eventually, more dangerous. The idiots who used to be harmless now vote. They run for office. They storm the Capitol. And every single day, the same platforms that connected them keep pushing them further from reality and closer to each other. That’s not a political movement. That’s a tabloid magazine with a voting booth. Sources Sunstein, C. R. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton University Press. Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175-195. Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. Oxford University Press. Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press. Facebook Internal Research. (2019). Carol’s Journey to QAnon. Disclosed via SEC filings by Frances Haugen, 2021. DiResta, R. Quoted in NBC News, October 22, 2021. “Carol’s Journey: What Facebook Knew About How It Radicalized Users.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe