One important part of the answer is that people associated with foreign governments, without admitting who they are, take extreme positions in social media posts with the deliberate goal of sparking division and conflict. These extreme posts take advantage of the social media algorithms, which are designed to heighten engagement, meaning they reward content that provokes a response.

Another important part of the answer is that people seeking to radicalize others lay out trails of breadcrumbs to more and more extreme positions.

These social media radicalization pipelines work much the same way whether recruiting jihadists or Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

You may feel like you’re “doing your own research,” moving from source to source, but you are really following a deliberate radicalization pipeline that’s designed to move you toward more and more extreme content at whatever pace you will tolerate. For example, after analyzing over 72 million user comments on over 330,000 videos posted on 349 YouTube channels, researchers found that users consistently migrated from milder to more extreme content.