> A plausible base-case scenario is a group of socially disabled internet dwellers dedicate their life to hounding you for imagined wrongs.
The intersection between the set of chronically online people who see this content and the set of people who actually vote is much smaller than you might think. Voter turnout is consistently very low among young people, despite how actively interested they may appear on sites like Reddit.
Most of this content also turns into preaching to the choir. They congregate in online communities where people already decided who they were going to vote for, so the online anger has little to no effect on the people who might actually vote for the candidate.
I think it's a mistake to assume this will always be the case.
A decade ago, more than half my 40+ yo extended family was still only beginning to get exposed to the internet due to touchscreen phones and basic data plans becoming the default in the US. A few of them are now brain-fried Facebook conspiracy group people.
It seems reasonable that eventually most people will have a "safe space" on the internet to share their thoughts. And eventually, mass hysteria and mobs and general opinion that used to only exist online will (and clearly already has started to) become an IRL phenomenon.
> The intersection between the set of chronically online people who see this content and the set of people who actually vote is much smaller than you might think. Voter turnout is consistently very low among young people, despite how actively interested they may appear on sites like Reddit.
Not all chronically online people are in the young voter bucket. There are Boomers with terminal Facebook brain and a lot of Redditors have accounts that are almost old enough to vote in America.
The intersection between the set of chronically online people who see this content and the set of people who actually vote is much smaller than you might think. Voter turnout is consistently very low among young people, despite how actively interested they may appear on sites like Reddit.
Most of this content also turns into preaching to the choir. They congregate in online communities where people already decided who they were going to vote for, so the online anger has little to no effect on the people who might actually vote for the candidate.