I think exposure over long enough periods of time can have a normalizing effect on a person. At first, it’s shocking, but as things progress you get desensitized to it, you see it all the time, hear people talking about it, see it commonly on your feed, and eventually you don’t see it as a big deal.

This actually doesn’t mean simply happen in other spaces like in the Alt-Right pipeline (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108/7920). You start out watching cute little atheist videos, and 18 months later you’re onto Jered Taylor. The process is slow and as it progresses the person maintains little of the disgust that would have prevented them from saying that stuff to start with. In the beginning, the apolitical centrist would absolutely not be willing to watch a Jered Taylor video. By the end of the journey, Jered Taylor might well be tame. In the porn space, you don’t start out with the violent, the child porn, the beastiality, you start with playboy stuff. But you keep going down the line and eventually you’ll watch that because it keeps showing up, and people you know are talking about it, and so you start watching it and eventually watching an old guy have sex with a preteen is no big deal.

The internet has enabled a lot of this simply because of how it works. It’s mostly private. You don’t know what I watch. Therefore the shame factor never comes up. And because it’s infinite, you can watch it for hours and never catch onto the process of normalization until you end up with some sort of shock to the system, which by definition never comes because no one catches it, and the algorithm doesn’t care. It just wants you to click the links.