Amanda Marcotte has written a fascinating deep dive report on online radicalization for Salon that I highly recommend. I’ll just excerpt this piece of it: The same rabbit-hole phenomenon that can draw social media users deeper into the world of eating disorders or suicidal ideation also appears to be a factor in online radicalization. Lisa Sugiura notes that many of the men she interviewed while researching the “incel” community were first drawn into that world through unrelated or apolitical online material, before the algorithm turned their heads toward darker stuff. One interviewee, she said, had done a “simple Google search” about male pattern baldness and eventually ended up on “incel forums, which were heavily dissecting and debating whether being bald is an incel trait.” That man became an incel “very much through the algorithm,” Sugiura said, and through online conversations with people who “showed him a different way to view the world.” “Pathologies like eating disorders and suicidality exist on a continuum with radicalization,” said Brian Hughes, the American University scholar. “In a lot of cases, they’re co-morbid. Depression and radicalization are commonly seen together.” Just as online merchants hawking dangerous diet products exploit young women’s insecurities, he added, the world of far-right influencers displays “an obsession with an idealized masculine physique, which often leads to steroid abuse.” The most famous example of that phenomenon is Andrew Tate, a British influencer currently being held by Romanian authorities on charges of rape and human trafficking. Tate’s alleged victims say he choked them until they passed out,…