Playing Online with nazi Sympathizers and Conspiracy Theorists

[a completely inoffensive name]

Agreed. While I'd wager that most of the 12 year old edgelords will grow out of that phase, a portion wont and will further radicalize. Letting such behavior go unchecked will only foster an environment which promotes such behavior which will lead to more vulnerable people headed down the far right pipeline.

You nailed it right here. How many men in their early 20s use "simp" to describe the act of treating a woman with kindness.

I think this is a large part of the problem.

I am not defending it, but this has always been the case as far as I can remember. It is unacceptable, but not at all novel.

It's more the ratios of what kind of insults are in vogue, which have definitely shifted over the past 15 years.
And yes, young, frustrated men are usually the key demographic for authoritarian sects to persuade to act as soldiers (online and off) with an ideological purpose.

This is something that has kind of made me rather uncomfortable because I agree with it. Why uncomfortable?

I used to play Call of Duty (particularly Modern Warfare and Black Ops) back in their heyday, the game lobbies were an absolute scream fest of your mom jokes and all sorts of weird comebacks that someone learned in the playground at school and now tried to play it cool. Yes, it was a scream fest and rather toxic, but there was rarely the racial slur. It was kind of... I don't know, fun? In the end most people realised that nobody is taking this seriously and we're all there to have fun so everyone piled in with cheap headsets over the mic.

And here's the weird part - people knew it was joking, it was a combative style of messing around. Nowadays when I play online those kind of jokes have disappeared completely and it has been replaced by extreme rudeness, racial slurs, attacks on someone's name and other confrontational, direct way of abuse. I don't understand what happened.

Yes, those CoD lobbies in 2010 / 2011 / 2012 were kind of toxic but they were 80% of the time made as "yo I'm better at CoD" jokes. 2020's multiplayer game lobby is an absolutely ghastly pool of racism and hatred.

It's the same that happened to all the edgy internet forums. The in-joke died when they could no longer tell between edgy and the real deal. When it's not clear what the underlying understanding is (this is all in jest), new people will take things for face value.