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They argue this when they wanna say bigoted shit, or maybe if the bigoted shit simply doesn't affect them.
Normalising bigoted shit like this online under the guise of 
absolutely causes harm. There's a pyramid chart somewhere, where the bottom is "joking bigotry", and the top is "active legal persecution", because normalising bigotry is the first step.
online is in fact real life. it always has been, the people on it are real people saying real things. just because they may mean it less than they would irl doesn't make it not real life. if you talk to someone online that is a real person who is actually thinking about the things you say and the things they say in return
Imagine a world in which people decided that the telephone wasn't real life, so nothing you said on there mattered.
Whenever I've said "online is not real life", I've meant it more in a, "people who spend a ton of time online curate a feed of others who have similar views to their own and can forget that those views aren't reflective of the average person" sort of way. Hexbear is a version of the same thing - by spending time here we're choosing to see content from people whose views are closer to our own (liberals ofc).
But yeah I agree with everyone else that online does impact the real world, and will only do so more and more as more of the world gets plugged into it. Saying bigoted shit, even if it's "just a joke", reinforces those ideas in your head and if you're not careful you'll wake up one day fully unironically believing them. Seeing other people say bigoted shit makes the bigots more emboldened and makes the people being bigoted against more likely to disengage or self-censor - and then of course there's the unaligned people who might see bigoted shit being said and start to think that they should be saying it too.
We won't know the full degree to which this stuff fucks with your brain until we have multiple generations living under its sway, which is why I've increasingly come around to the idea that China is right to censor the shit out of the internet. Even if you can easily bypass it, knowing that you're doing something sketchy to see certain content is more than enough social pressure to keep that content from being fully normalized.
Even if you can easily bypass [the Great Firewall (GFW), the internet censorship apparatus of the Chinese mainland]
From personal experience, I would say that this has become a lot more difficult in recent years, because of difficulties in purchasing VPNs from within China, censorship of information on how to bypass the GFW, and the vast majority of VPNs just straight up not working in China anymore.
To bypass the GFW in China and access Western social media, you pretty much have to know someone irl who already knows how to bypass the GFW and have them share their method with you.
I feel like it's largely from luddite socialists who overreact against terminal online syndrome that they advocate for touching grass so much and ignore that the influence internet has on society
Like just look at how many shooters and rapists 4chan has harbored and developed. Shit is crazy
The internet is real life. Like not joking, things people do on the internet matter just as much as anything you do in the "real world."
For sure, I feel like people are trying to speak in the context of algorithmic filter bubbles, but even then, you can’t stay in your safe space forever before you’re exposed to unhinged thoughts/ideas
They want an excuse to say bigoted shit online.
Online isn't real life in the sense that most people are lurkers online and the majority of the posting/commenting (or even voting, e.g. like/dislike/react) comes from a minor percentage of the IRL population
The problem is that the large body of lurkers can still read the extreme deranged shit that is posted by the small body of posters
Received wisdom is received wisdom, no matter the vector. So, yeah, the shit will spread.
Who are these people you're talking about?
"WHO IS SCREAMING AT ME TO LOG OFF? SHOW YOURSELF COWARDS!"
"I will never log off."
Mainly the cultural zeitgeist at large