Whitney Phillips, It Wasn’t
Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture, “Fun,” and the Fires of Exclusionary
Laughter, Social Media + Society:

I realized that many of the young
reporters who initially helped amplify the white nationalist “alt right” by
pointing and laughing at them, had all come up in and around internet
culture-type circles. They may not have been trolls themselves, but their
familiarity with trolling subculture, and experience with precisely the kind of
discordant swirl featured in the aforementioned early-2000s image dump,
perfectly prepped them for pro-Trump shitposting. They knew what this was. This
was just trolls being trolls. This was just 4chan being 4chan. This was just
the internet. Those Swastikas didn’t mean anything. They recognized the
clothes the wolf was wearing, I argued, and so they didn’t recognize the wolf.

This was how the wolf operated: by
exploiting the fact that so many (white) people have been trained not to take
the things that happen on the internet very seriously. They operated by laundering
hate into the mainstream through “ironically” racist memes, then using all that
laughter as a radicalization and recruitment tool.