>>147926I mean, it's something that happened. That's pretty much all I can say. The first signs of it were when trolls who'd bleed over into the non-/b/ boards stopped being all "UYGHUR UYGHUR UYGHUR UYGHUR" and "FAGGOTS DESERVE DEATH" and started posting infographics, but I didn't actually know what was going on for sure until later… basically, it was weird enough that I took note of it, but I assumed it was still supposed to be some kind of trolling the first couple times. It's, you know, really creepy in retrospect - a lot of the tactics they were confirmed to be employing were there, like if you interacted with them they'd try to
argue with you, in a way which was just very odd at that time if you weren't clued in to what was going on. It was a large enough site that it wouldn't have been surprising if a few unironic racists were around, but over time they'd bleed into every board trying to shame everybody else, working in teams to try to make themselves seem like a larger presence than they actually were… and in retrospect it was entirely in line with the stuff stormfront was doing at that time, but a lot of users didn't know about that… so some, especially newer ones who came when the site was still popular-and-rising, fell for it.
For an idea of what it looks like when dumbass gay chantards fall hard for retarded Nazi ops:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-57920928(tbf, he could have already been a racist, I forget when he joined /lgbt/, but /lgbt/ itself was a relatively late addition to the site…)