Racism on the internet is as old as the internet itself. What changed is that the internet consolidated. Before the days of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, the internet was a million message boards for every single interest. You would have a sewing message board, a coffee-drinking message board, a skipping-rocks-at-the-lake message board, a message board for people who liked hats. Etc. And the racists would literally hang out on something called like racism.com, and you would barely see them. And when a racist showed up on your sewing forum, they would be banned immediately, because it's just a small forum for like-minded people and the moderators would have had free rein to ban them without much forethought or hassle. They would just go, "That's a weird post," and hit ban. Now everybody on the internet has been shoved together on the same seven websites, and so the moderators of these websites are pretty much the moderators of the entire internet. Given that power, they're conservative with their bans. People get away with a lot more. So the difference between then and now is that everyone is far more connected than they used to be, and the moderation on these massive sites is less swift and assured than the moderation on the smaller sites of old.
