Good question. Genuinely impossible for me to know, actually. On the one hand, things don't feel like they had been radically different back then, I was stuck in a bubble full of people sharing "Zeitgeist" (that shitty "documentary") and circlejerking each other about how they are wiser and more intelligent for months - in b4 jokes about Lemmy not being any different. My father, an old Stalinist made cynical and paranoid by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of course also immediately supported it on the principle of "anything anti US must be true and righteous!" So I had my work laid out for me, there.

But some stuff trickled through, like in, wow does that date things, Google Video comments which I remember seeing vividly. Or the odd visitor to a forum getting off an argument before being banned as a "shill". Or, interestingly enough, I also got there because the circle-jerky nature of those spaces had them talk about people working for the CIA or some shit, to argue with them - which got me curious about who those people were, and I found out, they were presenting much more reasonable arguments.

I am in general sceptical of explaining everything with "the nature of the internet" and "filter bubbles". While that undoubtedly has clear and real effects, I still subscribe to those effects panning out in the way we witness, because of how more broadly, capitalism has decayed further and further into crisis mode ever since, and more clearly divorced from its marriage with parliamentarian, liberal democracy even in western nations, and the ownership of media, both social and traditional, has consolidated more and more into the hands of a few people, in addition to the profit incentive shaping the way information is packaged and communicated. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the genocide in Rwanda, the mass killing of communists in Indonesia, none of those needed the internet to happen - and I find it suspicious how we look for the fault for everything now in "common people just being monsters when left to their own devices in an unregulated space", when that space is heavily regulated both abstractly by the profit motive and addictive engagement, and even special interests of individual capitalists nowadays.

Sry, went a bit on a rant there, not implying that was what you were arguing, that's more me arguing against something just brought up in general quite often nowadays, which I think focuses in on one part of reality (again: it has an effect, not disputing that), in order to explain away other parts of the dynamic at play.