Why the Internet Is "dangerous" (1995)

There was such a thing as "normal" back in those days which, for better or worse, provided friction to the spread of unorthodox ideas.

Now, and because of the web, there is no more "normal." QAnon started as a joke on 4chan and has become the predominant political and cultural movement of the Western world entirely because the internet provides a near frictionless medium for the acceleration of bullshit. Random people start boutique cults on TikTok and get more followers than most pre-internet cults could ever have hoped for. A dozen or so accounts can entirely dominate the COVID misinformation space on Facebook. The scale and speed of travel is transformational. The world in which travel across the ocean takes weeks is fundamentally different than the world in which it takes hours.

I disagree with the thesis of the article in that I believe governments are a part of the problem, and that regulating the internet at that level would destroy the only de facto public mass communications medium in existence, and only usher in a massive global surveillance state (and it has.) But I disagree with your implication that the internet has had net zero effect on the harm that the spread of bad information has had on society. The "good memes" the article refers to have not prevailed.