I share the concerns of the OP.
My personal view is that fascist extremists are seeking to spread their own forms of disinformation on any website that will tolerate their twisted views. Including this one.
My impression is that the Daily Mail is the preferred source of ‘news’ in the News section on this site. Speaking personally, I became concerned when the first reference to Breitbart was not laughed out of town, and now Breitbart appears to have become an accepted source of ‘news’ on this site, and discussions around it are taken seriously.
I didn’t see the reference to Stormfront, but it is part of the same trend of normalising sites that spread lies and disinformation, while ridiculing sites and individuals that are less fascist in tone.
Is there a connection, I wonder, with this peer-reviewed research?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082972
The full paper is here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3182761_code2816807.pdf?abstractid=3082972&mirid=1
A summary from the New York Times is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html
For those who don’t want to read it, I’ll summarise. Using a variety of robust measures, the researchers looked at the frequency of racially-motivated attacks in Germany on asylum-seekers and the local coverage on TV news; usage of Facebook and the impact of other events, such as major sporting events involving the German national team.
Where Facebook use was above the mean (by one standard deviation), the frequency of such attacks increased by 50%. This is a strong correlation.
The frequency of attacks was not correlated with any other effect
This was confirmed by looking at relevant statistics when the internet was unavailable. Racially-motivated attacks slowed in proportion. TV news coverage of atrocities did not significantly affect the number of attacks, but an increase in the number of Facebook posts by the AfD (right-wing German political party) was strongly correlated with increases in racially-motivated attacks.
The conclusion is that at least 13% of racially-motivated attacks occur as a direct result of people reading posts on Facebook from far-right sources.
I look at the AB community and it seems to me that there are many people with a lot of time on their hands. Some of them appear to spend that time looking at Youtube vidoes and Stormfront, Breibart and other sites of a similar nature.
It would be fascinating, and perhaps revealing, to correlate the social media usage against the level of tolerance for other views among users of this site. What results might one see, do you think?