There is no demographic data on these fringe online communities, but Blackburn believes they’re led by a group of men—the groups are notoriously misogynistic—in their mid-to-late 20s who grew up reading 4Chan, which has been around for over a decade. “They’ve become very good at curating content and enticing people in the information-overload culture we live in today. These guys have spent ten years figuring out how to get their message out.” Typically, they use short, catchy messages, jokes, or memes—content that is easy to share on Twitter and Facebook. The best-known meme to come out of these communities is Pepe the Frog, a cartoon frog often juxtaposed with racist words or symbols. In September 2016, the Anti-Defamation League identified Pepe as a hate symbol.

“In my class a few years ago, I’d always be able to identify subcultural trolls. They were the only ones who knew this particular set of jokes or memes. But now more and more trolling references have been integrated into the broader internet lexicon. Now, one of my students might just have seen the joke on Facebook,” Phillips said.

The election lent a degree of legitimacy to these fringe online communities. In turn, these communities helped Trump to win the election, a victory that has empowered them further. Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump’s campaign engaged with forums on Reddit, particularly The_Donald, the most popular subreddit (a subject-specific group) started by Trump supporters, often associated with the alt-right. About a year before the election, Trump shared a meme of Pepe the Frog’s face superimposed on his body. The following July, Trump hosted an AMA, or “Ask Me Anything,” on Reddit, inviting user questions. Instead of hosting the interview on the traditional /r/IAmA subreddit, as past presidential candidates have , however, he chose to publish it on The_Donald. As Trump engaged directly with this subreddit, the media began to report on the forum—which, in turn, attracted more people to it.

Since Trump’s election, these communities have become journalistic go-tos for a range of political stories. When tragedies happen—mass shootings or the violence in Charlottesville—Phillips said journalists have started going straight to communities within 4Chan with links to the alt-right. “It’s easy to write a story about people on 4Chan because they’re always saying something terrible,” Phillips said. “There has been an extreme amount of sharing and amplifying that crystallized what we understand to be the alt-right.”

Phillips argues that these communities started moving into the mainstream even before the 2016 campaigns. Memes, she said, have always been central to trolling subculture. But since 4Chan deletes content after just a few days, in order to understand the jokes, users had to be active in its communities. That changed in 2012 with the creation of Know Your Meme, an online database devoted to cataloguing memes from all over the internet. “Know Your Meme lowered the bar of entry, and allowed people to participate in the funny parts of trolling subculture,” said Phillips. Once people felt like they were in on the joke, Phillips told me, they became more likely to engage with them in other ways.