and has been a thing since at least the 1960s. It's usually a form of trolling because it relies heavily on getting a few people in the crowd to disagree loudly with the speaker. Then the crowd will form to watch the back and forth. On a large college campus there are thousands of people walking from lecture halls to lunch or the dorms or wherever and if they see or hear something going on they will check it out.
A partial list of campus trollers from the last 60 years:
General Hershey Bar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Hershy_Bar
Brother Jed and Sister Cindy (he called his trolling "confrontational evangelism"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Jed
The Unification Church / The Moonies / Rev. Sun Myung Moon
Steven Crowder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Crowder
Milo Yiannopolous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos
Curtis Yarvin
Jordan Peterson
Legacy media like NPR and NYT tend not to cover news about social media influencers. Kids don't do TV or radio so we are all somewhat siloed by our media preferences. I had a job where I had to scan all 7 major NYC daily newspapers every day before 11AM. It taught me a lot about how the same news event got filtered for different audiences. Mostly the differences in coverage are what gets left out. No one is well informed by such filters but algos and audience retention methods have many legacy media entities becoming even more polarized.
Does the NYT or NPR ever mention Mr Beast? He has the biggest audience in the world. I just checked and a random video he put up 20 hours ago has 40 million views. Mr. Beast has 435 million subscribers -- The NYT has 12 million.
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