To echo another poster here, what goes crazy is not "the internet" or even particularly any number of people on the internet, but the sort of disembodied, roiling click-frenzy created by the media in order to sell more ads. I was just twelve hours ago talking to a good friend of mine about exactly this, in a different context. He was also in the Army, a lifetime ago, but he was trained and worked in psychological operations. When I complained about the stupidity and insanity of a mass media infrastructure that survives only as a reflection of its ability to confuse and worry information consumers into reflexively clicking links to expose themselves to more advertising, he said he recognizes this situation as something that psyops would try to achieve after infiltrating enemy territory with more conventional special forces: Pervasive FUD, misdirection, and the reassignment of relevancy to advance at least one agenda.
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To echo another poster here, what goes crazy is not "the internet" or even particularly any number of people on the internet, but the sort of disembodied, roiling click-frenzy created by the media in order to sell more ads. I was just twelve hours ago talking to a good friend of mine about exactly this, in a different context. He was also in the Army, a lifetime ago, but he was trained and worked in psychological operations. When I complained about the stupidity and insanity of a mass media infrastructure that survives only as a reflection of its ability to confuse and worry information consumers into reflexively clicking links to expose themselves to more advertising, he said he recognizes this situation as something that psyops would try to achieve after infiltrating enemy territory with more conventional special forces: Pervasive FUD, misdirection, and the reassignment of relevancy to advance at least one agenda.