A few years ago, we noted that online personas were beginning to look like caricatures of people (particularly along political identities). There were increasing numbers of hashtags in profiles, along graphical memes and symbols that were likely spreading via social networks. https://twitter.com/uwcip/status/1357506955514834946

*we = research community, broadly

The design of the systems were shaping the spread of those norms… e.g. recommendation systems incentivized adding political hashtags to a profile (as it would pick up other similarly identified followers).

On January 6, those hashtag patriot and q and pepe profiles “came alive” in some sense, showing that they were no longer quirks of online culture, but an embodied mob, physically attacking our democracy (rather than just digitally picking at its foundations).

Of course, they had always been so, but it was no longer possible to deny the connection between these online caricatures of people and the actual people who have become the caricatures, dressed up in and waving the flags of Internet-incubated symbols and ideologies.