These are new phenomena, and they might be qualitatively different than anything that previously existed.

Historically, you could send a letter to a president. If the letter were unhinged, staff would throw it out. Thus, as a sociopath or a crazy, you'd have little or no access to a president.

Now, a president is bombarded by thousands of crazies per day, and he will actually read some portion of it. We're no longer ineffectually yelling at the TV: the man on the TV is listening. Anyone can easily gain a small part of a leader's attention, and collectively a group of crazies even without coordination can likely influence him.

Additionally, as a crazy prior to social media, you'd have to settle at best for periodicals from your extremist group of choice. Most of your life would be consuming mainstream information and interacting with normal people. This would balance you out a bit.

Now, you can consume extremist/conspiracy content all day long without ever coming close to running out, and your entire social group can be fellow crazies from around the world. You can create for yourself as pure an echo chamber as a cult in a commune.

It's a recipe for radicalization and induces the same strange-belief-conforming that can be seen in any and all religions.

This can play out at any scale. For instance, the majority of Republicans believe the election was stolen, liberal cities are overwhelmed by constant looting, and immigrants hoards are surging across the border. They truly live in an alternate universe, and it's driven by the information+social bubbles of social media.

I dub the phenomenon "bubbling". Whether the bubble is an internet troll funhouse or a fear-and-outrage feed or the welcoming arms of a coven of internet crazies, the bubble will shape most humans who enter one into the bubble's own image. You can and will be bubbled.

I'll go with the term bubbling for now, and suggest that we should have transparency into the bubbling that our elected officials are stuffed with.

I'll add to your thoughts with the interesting battles even to the courts where some officials could not block a user, and be forced to listen to crazies they tried to filter out.

I would actually pay money to see the feed that deniro (and some others) has been bubbled with the past so many years.

There was a time when I saw distant fam getting a deluge of questionable memes and such that cobbled partial news with partial non truths and feigned outrage mobs grew into real outrage mobs that believed even if shown their sources were suspect, they cared more about the bubble than sorting whats right and wrong.

I assume this has happened to many people and very few have access to the bubble layers for each person, we may never know the influences others have been fed that has been guiding them.