EU elections results -- Rip

looks a lot worse if you compare it to 2019, and account for the fact “other” has a lot of far right parties such as the “SS aren’t war criminals” AFD.

Am I reading the article correctly when I put the dividing line between right wing and left wing somewhere in the "other" section?

Which should tell us that access to information wasn't the problem.

Personally, I think the problem is that the internet allows the worst of humanity to congregate in a virtual space. The sort of people who would have felt completely alone with their "political opinions" (usually involving literal murder) before the internet – because they're such horrifying pieces of shit that nobody wanted anything to do with them – can now find likeminded human garbage online, and feel like their opinions are actually common, acceptable and mainstream. Couple that with the ability to spread disinformation as efficiently as information, and you end up where we are now. There's a reason why so many mass murderers have gotten their "education" on online forums like the various chans. And this isn't even getting into using machine learning to influence peoples' opinions like what corporations Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have provably done already and all in the service of the psychotic conservative agenda, which is a whole 'nother can of worms likely even worse than what we had before.

I unironically think that the internet was a mistake and will be our undoing.

Edit: relevant may-may