One of the tragedies of the Internet is that it deprives people of the opportunity to see the faces of everyone in the room when someone's talking. In real life, you can see that two people are loudly arguing and the other eight people in the room are looking at each other uncomfortably, or wandering away and congregating in a different room. On the Internet, you're not even aware of anyone but the hotheads, so it's all too easy to forget that they exist, and come to believe that their opinions are normal.
Which, since nobody likes to feel like they're the only one who thinks a certain way, probably does end up discouraging people from having moderate opinions over the long run.
+1 another side effect of internet is normalization of fringe behavior. Imagine some subculture/behavior that expresses one in 100k (0.0001% of people). And imagine most people know something on the order of 1000 ppl IRL. If those subcultured people congregate on the internet (~4.5B) we find a group of about 45k people which overwhelmingly validates that behavior to the group because it's a group so much larger than everyone they know in real life. It feels like it's so much more normal (as in within a std deviation) than it truly is.
It's totally benign when it's something like fans of silly hats, but also quite dark when its a criminal behavior.
This one factor explains so many of the niche issues that have exploded into the “mainstream”. Or more accurately: they’ve created an illusion of being mainstream.
This effect is so strong that some of the topics can barely be discussed any more without putting livelihoods and even personal safety at risk.
And it's not just social media either. Traditional media plays a big role in framing the discussion, as in every debate they make a point in making sure that to the other side of the responsible and well spoken scientist there's some rabid lunatic; thus the finer points never see the light of the day and everyone else trying to raise them gets bunched with the lunatics.
One of the tragedies of the Internet is that it deprives people of the opportunity to see the faces of everyone in the room when someone's talking. In real life, you can see that two people are loudly arguing and the other eight people in the room are looking at each other uncomfortably, or wandering away and congregating in a different room. On the Internet, you're not even aware of anyone but the hotheads, so it's all too easy to forget that they exist, and come to believe that their opinions are normal.
Which, since nobody likes to feel like they're the only one who thinks a certain way, probably does end up discouraging people from having moderate opinions over the long run.