I would have been easily radicalized into MRA stuff when I was in high school ~20 years ago, the prime time for wanting to feel like a victim. I was into nerd culture, I had friends in school but often felt depressed or like I wasn't welcome, was constantly frustrated about girls, etc. If these sorts of communities were around telling me, "You're not the problem, women are the problem," then it's something I definitely would have been open to. At the same time, I was so interested in being counter-cultural, or wanting to be edgy, that I could have been pulled either way into some ideological extreme... Mostly, in high school, that took the form of just stupid teenage shit like nonsense anarchism, marxism, atheism, and other largely benign ideologies that most teenagers start to explore, and finding, like, a legitimate racist hate group trying to recruit new members wasn't something that was as common.
I was active on internet BBS going back into the 90s, and while they were self-selective (mostly around nerdy, tech-focused things -- something that unified most young men on the internet at the time), they weren't as ideologically self-selective and bias-affirming as they are now. You were more likely to locate a group that interested you around a topic rather than a social identity, the ISPs took an active role monitoring their BBS' both for good and for bad. Prodigy BBS, where I used to go, maintained that you kept everything on topic, constantly deleted content that went off point, and notified/banned/suspended internet service accounts for not following the ToS. That sort of control just doesn't exist anymore, nobody is going to go on your ISP's BBS to talk about videogames... or politics... or anything else, and nobody would have much patience for an ISP that still takes your money, but bans you from using the internet because of things you wrote online.
Although, I also remember my first introduction to Alex Jones and InfoWars, back in the early to mid 2000s. I was introduced to it from a videogame forum, but it was in one of the million daily conspiracy theory forum arguments, where -- as a young person -- you just took it as a likely fact that Bush did 9/11 to invade Iraq and that Clinton was running false flag operations in Texas to get Americans used to the invasion of their neighborhoods and the militarization of America. At the time, I associated someone like Alex Jones as being an anti-Republican extreme liberal, it's something I didn't really understand, that a far right conservative would also be anti-Bush, because for me, I was anti-Bush because of the 2000 election (I was a teenager and it was one of the first times I felt truly passionate about an political event, something that wasn't passive like 'Save the Whales' or 'the Hole in the O-Zone layer'), and so the idea that some guy criticized both the Clintons and Bushes felt different as if he must be speaking some truth. Luckily, though, I never got pulled into that direction. I went to college right around the same time and more or less became an anti-conspiracy theorist, after having thankfully been guided in the right direction by intelligent people.
