Whenever I’ve said “online is not real life”, I’ve meant it more in a, “people who spend a ton of time online curate a feed of others who have similar views to their own and can forget that those views aren’t reflective of the average person” sort of way. Hexbear is a version of the same thing - by spending time here we’re choosing to see content from people whose views are closer to our own (liberals ofc).

But yeah I agree with everyone else that online does impact the real world, and will only do so more and more as more of the world gets plugged into it. Saying bigoted shit, even if it’s “just a joke”, reinforces those ideas in your head and if you’re not careful you’ll wake up one day fully unironically believing them. Seeing other people say bigoted shit makes the bigots more emboldened and makes the people being bigoted against more likely to disengage or self-censor - and then of course there’s the unaligned people who might see bigoted shit being said and start to think that they should be saying it too.

We won’t know the full degree to which this stuff fucks with your brain until we have multiple generations living under its sway, which is why I’ve increasingly come around to the idea that China is right to censor the shit out of the internet. Even if you can easily bypass it, knowing that you’re doing something sketchy to see certain content is more than enough social pressure to keep that content from being fully normalized.