March 16, 2021 – The ease with which social media companies have allowed fringe groups to organize, egged on by then-President Donald Trump himself, made the January 6 Capitol riot an inevitability, experts on a South by Southwest panel said Tuesday.

Brandy Zadrozny, investigative reporter NBC News, said the radicalization of online groups causing real world harm is not new, but said what is new is that “half of America seemed to get radicalized really, really, quickly.”

Niche pockets containing militia, Q-Anon conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaccination spaces grew and burst in conversation. “It was inevitable that [the Capital riot] was going to happen,” she said, adding she was on the speakerphone with a colleague “just holding our breaths, waiting for it to happen.”

Social media culpability

“It’s hard to know when we actually got into this space,” when talking about the incredible rise of online conspiracies and disinformation, Zadrozny said.

She argued that these groups were given a safe space to foment dissent, hatred and division for many months. The result was a bubble of tensions ready to burst, she added.

The panelists pointed toward Facebook’s Groups feature, where users can create and join groups of special interest to them, as a leading culprit behind the tools and resources used by the violent protestors and online conspiracist groups that formed. These groups allowed fake news to proliferate behind walls that journalists could not see, said Ben Collins, reporter at NBC News. He added people are now disputing long-held facts about things around them.

Predicting insurrection

Zadrozny was not alone in the panel in predicting the insurrection as a result of growing online misinformation or other fake news sources. John Sands, director of learning and impact at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said he also saw it coming and tried to raise the alarm about the incoming insurrection.

He said it feels like being “chicken little” when trying “to get people to understand that things are getting worse when things are already quite bad.” Sands blamed the insurrection on “a lack of seriousness on the part of government institutions.”

What confounds Joan Donovan, research director at the Shorenstein Center on media, politics, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is that the GOP did not recognize that the violent protestors were part of their base. She said that former President Trump was a “cudgel” to the GOP as one who would “bring a religious holy war.”