Frankly I'm surprised it took this long for the chans to produce another mass murderer considering the depths to which they've sunk in past years.
I'm starting to be of two minds about internet anonymity in general; it seems that a lot of people simply have little to no independent moral understanding and need social pressure to act half-decently.
I think that internet culture played a role but I don't think that anonymity is the whole story. I'm protective about disconnecting my online and offline lives bar with people that I've learned to trust and I think that often leads to better conversation and discussions.
The issue for me is a couple of things but the primary one is the weaponisation of jokes, memes and "irony" to normalise what are distasteful and disgusting views. The idea is to present something as it is a joke to give yourself plausible deniability while believing the ideas spread. You can go back to when it started or which movements far right people latched themselves on to to try and get some amount of popular support but clearly radicalisation in this form is something that we need to address and need to address soon. I don't think that its something that there really can be a legal solution to; realistically the answer has to the the old fashioned but hard to do thing where decent, ordinary people call out people who say such things either to convince them to change their mind (or realise the social harm in not being seen to have) or to have them not have their views accepted in polite society. Its a slog I admit and not easy, but solutions to these things never are.
