Originally Posted by
Elegiac
A combination of being early adopters of social media which remains largely unregulated, combined with a public primed to imbibe all manner of nonsense thanks to decades of also largely unregulated programming by parties like Fox News (there's a strong correlation between countries where Newscorp has a significant presence and a rise in right wing extremism, see: New Zealand vs. the rest of the Anglosphere), as well as low to no emphasis on digital literacy (in the sense of being able to assess what claims and sources are valid and which are not).
Speech is like alcohol. Banning it outright is bad, but a complete free-for-all is equally so as attested by the hundreds of thousands of deaths in this country in the past few years as well as the rapid erosion of what little democratic aspects it has.