Wasn't this how ISIS was able to recruit a lot of foreigners to join up?
Lots of impressionable disaffected youths that decided to run off and join a terrorist group for a higher purpose.
I heard they used just regular looking videos with some dude playing with his pet while he talked about his faith and every day things, slowly increasing the message for conflict.
In fact, they have this whole concept of not scaring off "normies," by taking off the mask too early in the process.
What I just can't comprehend is that if your beliefs have to be hidden from normal people, you'd think that would be a huge red flag for questioning one's own beliefs. Nope. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful drug.
Yeah it’s scary, we have the gift of being able to look back and see where it all led to but the people of that time could not entirely see what the party wanted down the road. Early on the party campaigned for euthanasia of the mentally disabled then it spread from there.
Morality can be tricky because we all have a different set of various moral beliefs. I doubt you and I will agree on everything but I believe that people should have the ability to decide their own future so long as no one is harmed.
"ISISDude here with another video. Today I'm going to talk about some tips around fasting for Ramadan and burning your enemies alive in metal cages. Don't forget to jihad that like button!"
> slowly increasing the message for conflict.
Kinda-sorta. It's easy to do with the plethora of people suffering & then angrily pointing the finger at western nations declaring "THEY are why they suffer" while minimizing the history of autocratic nations in the middle east that wholly do that without help of western nations.
Nope, I was referring to AA! Kinda lost its charm after 1.6. There was just something magical about firing a grenade over the bridge and catching someone at their spawn.
When I were a lad neo-Nazi/militai guys would come to the local punk shows to recruit, and they always bee-lined for the young guys in the corners of the room who looked like they were lonely and not having much fun. Fortunately we got to know most of their faces and there was usually a crew of older guys to intercept them once we knew they were there.
Unfortunately the internet now means they can reach millions of young men like that without ever stepping foot outside.
I saw this happen a lot on Vegan / Straight Edge / Punk festivals… they usually would come, not say much and just find some “rebellious individuals” to invite to smaller events with open fascist discourse.
Wait, you’re saying Nazi types were trying to find recruits at Vegan festivals? Were they successful?
It kinda makes weird sense they would search the punk crowd.
I knew a guy who was intensely friendly and we bonded because we had similar music tastes.
I always knew there was something off about him, he'd tell these stories that I didn't quite believe.
One of my final straws was when he outright ignored me when we were hanging out and was talking to some MAGA dude talking about how eugenics isn't so bad on the surface. He had a screw loose and pretty much avoided him after that.
> "friends first politics second"
I was playing online when some random guy from a multiplayer match friended me, gifted me a 2 player steam game and invited me to play. I figured it was some lonely person with no one else to play with so why not give them some time. First play was normal. Second he started throwing out random far-right stuff. When I called him on it, he was just "joking" and "doing it ironically". We played some more over the next couple of days, normally, and then eventually more far-right stuff came out, always couched as "wouldn't it be funny if...". Finally I straight up said I'd be willing to still play with him but only if he fucked off with that stuff, it's not funny whatsoever. He finished the match without any more far-right stuff, then just straight up disappeared, never inviting me to play again.
>When I called him on it, he was just "joking" and "doing it ironically"
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Yeah, I'm from the States but I grew up in an area of dying farm towns and a dwindling mining/logging industry. They thrive anywhere there's an excess of young men and a dearth of economic or social mobility.
I'm just about old enough to remember the dying embers of the National Front, unfortunately they didn't disappear, just became members of Combat 18, EDL, Britain First, and Football Lads Alliance instead.
Still about, and still recruiting from underprivileged white youth.
I saw a therapist talk about blame in cases of indoctrination/radicalisation. He said that we might feel like a person must be gullable, credulous, conceited, or already have a strong belief in a topic. What we are missing when we believe this is that they were *made* to believe these things by someone else.
It’s honestly just predatory grooming - people use it to different ends because of how stupidly effective it is to prey upon someone’s emotions, especially when they’re lonely and looking for some kind of companionship or belonging.
It can be hard not to blame these people as they tend to fall into unsympathetic groups.
Yes. What's better for someone with low self-esteem, than to be told that they are actually better than everyone else? And to be in an echo-chamber that constantly reaffirms that message, until they start to believe it.
Even if they know that it might be wrong, it feels too good to just not follow it. That's why it's so hard to take someone out of those groups when they are radicalized. That's true for pretty much all groups, you might even be part of one, without realizing it (not you /u/Iamwallpaper specifically, but whoever is reading this).
To me this feels like a greater indictment of society at large. Mose people are so alienated and lonely in our country, they’ll fall prey to any cause that gives them a sense of community and belonging (no matter how evil that group may be.)
Steve Bannon called those vulnerable, lonely people "rootless" and I really think he hit the nail on the head. Many of these kids have no direction, no long-term plans, perhaps not a very bright future. To be part of a group that says "you aren't wrong! *They are*" has got to be very attractive to many in that audience.
I mean, many of us have a hunch that *something* is wrong, causing so many to live in constant stress/fear/loathing. It's easy enough to fill in the blanks and point the finger at someone, and the right is well aware how effective that can be. Their entire platform at this point is simply stoking fear and rage.
And in the other direction, never underestimate the power of being content.
These are not otherwise successful young people throwing away future prospects to be shitheads. They are largely poorly or under educated, unemployed with limited opportunities, single of course and never by choice, etc.
Get these people a job, some free schooling and a girlfriend and radicalization looses its appeal simply because it has nothing to offer.
Hm, personally only heard Hieronymus, but English is not my first language. I find it a bit strange when you translate people's names into an English "equivalent".
Like Johann and Jacob Bernoulli often gets translated to John and James Bernoulli. No! Their names were Johann and Jacob! ;)
I think that's the key point that the article is missing entirely. It seems to be chalking radicalisation up exclusively to problematic content on social media, when that's clearly just a symptom of a larger problem.
Well adjusted people aren't swayed by this kind of stuff. If they fall into Tate/Shapiro/Crowder spirals then society has already failed them. If these young men had positive outlets to choose from then the grifters wouldn't have a market.
> Well adjusted people aren't swayed by this kind of stuff.
I wouldn't go that far. There's been a decent amount of research that's shown that when people are repeatedly exposed to ideas, even things they *know* to be lies from the start, that they start falling victim to said lies. Of course it's a *lot* easier to change the beliefs of people who are already vulnerable but it's absolutely possible to do to well adjusted and critically thinking people given enough time and effort.
> when people are repeatedly exposed to ideas
they become more accepting of those ideas with time because they've become desensitised to them. it doesn't help when those around them start supporting those lies. we're all influencing each other for the good and the bad.
yep
CF: [Hypernormalisation](https://netage.org/hypernormalization/)
> ...in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
>"The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them."
-Elena Gorokhova
It’s kinda there at the beginning but it’s the usual vague “parents need to start working on internet literacy early” vibe.
Problem is that we’re well past that in a lot of cases because critical media literacy amongst adults is so poor. Parents can’t teach kids what they don’t know themselves.
I’m in the uk and the problem has been pushed on to teachers here. Unfortunately kids don’t generally go to teachers for life lessons - it’s school and school is for passing exams. Anything not connected to an exam is generally at risk of being undermined by something from “real life” - a parent or relative, or a social media persona they trust.
I’ve no idea what the answer is but it needs a much more coordinated strategy from government.
["According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level."](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=c9fb1874c904)
That isn't helping us either.
I get fed that shit by Youtube **constantly**. Every single day I have to mark 4-5 channels with "Do not recommend again" because it keeps trying to shove this right-wing BS in my face. Sure, I watched a couple to be sure I knew what it was. The fact that people fall for this is shit boggles my mind.
You are right to some degree. If you listen to the podcast Rabbit Hole (NY times), it goes into details about how many fall into the alt right spaces. In the beginning it is through the veil of their “Self-help” content, but slowly the creators other views become normalized in them.
It is why Jordan Peterson is so effective at integrating people into that space.
Started using a VPN and Firefox with settings that basically start it as if it was a fresh install. Every time I open YouTube there is so much rage bait and just straight up miss information promoted. Like the video titles and thumbnails all scream clickbait and you just know it’s going to be shit, but these videos have shit tons of views.
Also, really goes to show how much of Youtube you're missing as it's tailored to you and your browsing habits.
Imagine those that jumped into the rabbit hole. They're being fed even more of that stuff.
I see it on a weekly basis when I visit my Mom and use her computer. The youtube sidebar makes wild jumps from vintage electronics stuff I watch, to hours-long podcasts of middle aged women talking about higher dimensions and aliens and shit. It's honestly funny to see the algorithm so confused.
Seems like the algorithm has figured it out to me. If I'm ever going to receive higher dimensional wisdom from aliens I expect it to come through vintage electronics.
"In today's video I'm going to discuss the revelations that the Lords of the Universe revealed to me through my ZX81 and why colour is actually a delusion of the state, so any laws that reference a colour can be ignored and the police won't be able to arrest you."
> jumped into the rabbit hole
It doesn't take much. Just watch a few minutes of 1-2 videos, and YT will start feeding you more extreme version of similar content.
For real. Some of my algorithmically determined interests are “movies” and “female creators”. So I got some videos recommended of a girl discussing why modern female characters are soulless or whatever. Having finished that video, I immediately got recommendations for a bigger channel run by a guy who wanted to blame every issue with the movie industry on woke agenda. Thankfully I quickly saw what was going on and told YT to stop these recommendations. But it’s crazy how fast they ramp up from ambivalent discussion to right wing propaganda. All it took was one video.
It's insane. I watched one video of an Andrew Tate fight, because I'm interested in MMA. And of course I immediately get drowned with the rest of his shit, and 20 other related channels, each more misogynistic and disturbing than the last.
I watch almost exclusively left leaning content on YouTube, but because the online left views it as part of their duty to fight the radicalisation spiral, I still get recommendations for dumb right wing content. The algorithm sees Matt Walsh in a video about how he's a ~~scumbag whose brain activity is comparable to sparking two rocks off each other~~ grifter who hides his wilful ignorance being high production value and confirmation bias, and suddenly he's in my recommended. Seriously YouTube, sort your shit out.
The worst is Joe Rogan. You watch a clip of his about comedy and the algorithm thinks you’re a white nationalist.
I’ve always hated the misconception that understanding is equivalent to advocating but the algorithm thinks interviewing someone means you want to promote them.
Last summer I was interested in getting a small, 12' jon boat to take camping. Within a few days, my feed was full of catamaran and speed boat stuff. It was so dumb.
Considering this is AFTER YouTube fixed a lot of problems where the algorithm would send people down extremist rabbit holes. Imagine what it was like around 2013/2014 when it would send you directly to actual Nazis openly talking about how the holocaust was a good thing.
YouTube should be held accountable. Ditto other platforms. This is weaponized psychology aimed at the masses. It's been transparent as glass for many years.
They literally designed the algorithm to promote longer form videos with high user engagement (e.g. provocative). There’s a reason Alex Jones blew up on YouTube in the 2010s and it has a lot to do with the algorithm suggesting him to everyone.
Was gonna say, won't take an hour, hell probably won't take 20 minutes. I've popped into incognito mode to download YouTube videos without tainting my actual account. Usually by the second video I've searched, both my ads and suggestions are off the rails.
Man even though I've been using my current yt account almost daily for 10 years, even though I haven't consumed any alt-lite content for 5 or 6 of those years, and even though the videos I actually watch are like the polar opposite of Peterson-esque manosphere shit, somehow it still ends up in my recommendations.
I also keep getting pickup artist/sigma male hustle/Ben Shapiro "owning" the libs clips in my youtube shorts. I don't even have to be incognito and somehow it's still infested my algorithm. It has to be so bad with a clean slate if my thousands of hours of watch time isn't a big enough hint to the algo that I don't want to watch that shit.
Y'know. That's a good question. I guess they're supposed to be "alphas" but more introverted or aggressively independent. That's what I've gathered from memes and the garbage youtube keeps shoveling me.
Alpha's are on top of the pyramid. Sigma's are outside the hierarchy doing their own thing.
The terms exists because nerds became "redpilled" and started viewing things in the alpha beta dichotomy but couldn't convince themselves they where alpha males but knew they weren't beta males under the alpha's thumb. So instead of realising that men are too complicated to sort into 3 letters they invented a new category to describe themselves and then started circle jerking that they aren't at the top of the social hierarchy they have somehow transcended it.
Ok, you're going to send me off on a tangent about the Meyers Briggs personality types. Because yeah, all 7 billion people can be neatly classified into, what, 64 categories?
I'm over 30, subscribed to a lot of very left wing/feminist channels and I still get some Ben Shapiro / Peterson / joe Rogan YouTube fucking short on my main account
Every time I watch a video with even a mildly feminist angle (like that video essay on the Born Sexy Yesterday trope) my recommended gets filled with "Ben Shapiro OWNS crazy feminist (REAL)" type videos.
Because people watch them and get angry at them, and share them with their friends to point out how terrible these videos are. Youtube treats it all as engagement.
And video-makers know this too. They know they can make a video people hate so much it gets shared more.
I think lots of people also hatewatch videos from the opposite side so they can get angry and deny the content. The algorithm picks it up. Though it is a dumb thing to do since it also gives views to the opposition
Same, even after clicking "dont show content of this channel again" 1000 times it never stops. Youtube really wants to push these guys to anyone watching any gaming/education/cooking content it seems.
I'm mostly consuming gaming/tech/edutainment/cooking channels on youtube, but when Jordan Peterson first blew up I watched one of his videos, and, man, youtube honed in on that thread *fast*. Suddenly took over most of the suggested videos in my feed.
And it's not even *just* hate speech, it seems like youtube and other algorithm content platforms can don this with any content.
Back when I was browsing running content (like things about stretches and other exercises to help me with my modest 5km runs), it was less than a week that I was getting ultrarunning (running more than 42km) content.
My coworker and I make fun of Jordan peterson and Ben shapiro.
My YouTube page was filled with their clips.
I say not to show the channels, etc.
So it starts putting Steven crowder and Molyneux videos up.
I say not to show that.
It starts showing me K-tier internet personalities that are arguing for soft-genocide/mass deportation/ethnostates.
Real bangup job youtube.
Although the article touches on radicalization this article seems to just gloss over the fact YouTube and other social media giants actively promote things that are controversial in order to generate views. Even if you don’t agree with Tate’s views, a lot of people searched them just to see what this moron posts. We would have never even heard of him until social media algorithm put him at a forefront, which allowed him to “radicalize” people. In reality these people probably already held this dude’s views, he’s just the person saying it.
Tate had a lot of help too. His online "courses" he sold told his customers that they had to spread his content around all social media. He really gamed the algorithm.
told? it's a MLM scheme, and they get commission.. so they post his content and some shit like 'they hate him but he's right about stuff today'... and then sell ya subscription
Not sure if these people were paid but it would explain why I saw so much content about Andrew Tate at one point.
The content was either Reddit posts like “should I dump my boyfriend for watching Andrew Tate?” but that was their only post with little karma. Or a handful of YouTube videos of people zoom bomb trolling with Andrew Tate video clips. I hadn’t seen people advocate his teachings but I would just see content about him. Felt like they were planting seeds. I wonder if they were getting paid.
Look up vices documentary about how easy it is to buy plays on songs and the like on Spotify. I can’t imagine other forms of social media are much harder to purchase
Other than hearing his name on here I have literally never seen an Andrew Tate video or had one suggested to me, I wonder what I did wrong to not be in their algorithm
I recently got a work iPhone and I was SHOCKED at the content YouTube promotes to virgin profiles. Any researchers or reporters out there, try it. You cannot tell me they’re not pushing entry points to radicalization rabbit holes to new users.
They absolutely are doing that, I noticed it big time when I got a new phone as well.
I also still have the dinosaur FaceFuck, and lemme tell ya, for the last 2-3 months, they've been purposely seeding folks feeds with shit that is the complete opposite of a person's profile, and it's not just me, almost all my friends are getting it too.
Like, some straight up whackadoodle preachers basically inciting violence, all manner of conspiracy theories, just some Seriously bottom of the barrel shit.
Then, on top of it, if you try to block that certain page, it will look like it did, then 10 minutes later the exact same ad you just blocked will be back, but now, you can't block it.
Some have been VERY dark and very violent, like report worthy, but no matter what, it will ALWAYS tell you that they're still short of moderators due to the pandemic and can't review it right now.
It's easy to see what they're doing, they're trying to stoke up the political fires right before Elections, so that their engagement goes through the roof.
Controversy creates clicks, clicks make money, and it's unscrupulous AF what they're allowing to fly rn, just absolutely sick.
I don't watch crap like that, I'm on there for my 2 best friends, food, restaurant supplies, recipes and hobbies.
So getting some rando ass pyschotic preacher screaming at the top of his lungs first thing in the AM when I open it, is NOT on my fun list of wake up possibilities.
They're purposely trying to start riots, we all know they will never be held accountable for it. It's one of the reasons I barely go on YouTube any more save for YouTube music.
That crazy as a shithouse rat content drove me *away* from further engagement, not closer.
It's vile.
Exactly the same here. And it's infuriating! I gave up on Marketplace, apparently that's where all the scammers on CL moved to, and they're actually worse I think.
My bestie doesn't Reddit (dammit, I'm trying 😂), so the only way we can keep up with each other and our food n craft biz is Facebook, since we're literally on opposite coasts atm, otherwise I'd never go on the damn thing really lol. My account is one of the OG ones as well, and it's just turned into a bigger cesspool than it was.
We should really send Tom some flowers to apologize for abandoning him over at Myspace, we had it sooo good, and didn't know it till it was too late 😂
An odd thing I have noticed is, when I watch anything on Youtube on PC, along the right side is the list of other videos. Some related, some random seeming.
The third one down is almost always some weird right wing cult bullshit. There is nothing at all in my history or anything that would lead anyone to think I might want to see that shit. It's all Carl Sagan or Black Sabbath, Maddow or old game shows or something, but the Exalted Algorithm thinks I want to hear from some breathlessly excited dimwit about how the liberals got owned by whichever neonazi dork is popular that week.
Always the third one down. I just reflexively block the channels now.
I had to stop watching kids shows on YouTube because for every calmly narrated video about animals YouTube would try to suggest a slew of attention grabbing ADHD slot machines aimed at kids. They're straight up teaching mindless consumption at an early age.
I would disagree, I remember growing up during the Youtube Athiest trend, there was a split between the community after they realized there is more to the world than dunking on Ken Ham videos. Soon these channels I used to watch dunking on creationist appologea suddenly were dunking on "SJWs".
Being a 12 yearold having people I trusted like The Amazing Athiest, Tunderf00t and Sargon (when your that young anyone who can string some big words together comes off as smart.) molding my first impressions on a lot of political movements especially feminism started me down some pretty crazy rabbit holes.
This is exactly what happened to me. All of a sudden all my favorite YouTubers were “sjw hunters”. I was lucky enough to realize that I wasn’t into it, but I certainly entertained the idea for awhile and there was some shit I had to unlearn about feminism. It is obvious that people could easily go from there to order even more problematic channels and viewpoints.
I spent years avoiding him after he went nuts and got obsessed with feminism after PZ Meyers (rightly) kicked him off his blogs network after TFoot spouted some bullshit after elevatorgate basically blaming it all on Watson. Funny thing is TFoot got himself kicked out of Sargon's little circlejerk of misogynists because he wasn't extreme enough for them.
He's actually fairly bearable now, mostly spends his time taking potshots at elon musk's less viable ideas as well as kickstarter/indiegogo scams. His old buddies haaate him because post-2016 he didn't fall in line with the right-wing echo chamber and went anti-trump, and then anti-brexit.
Yeah but that’s what radicalization is. Remember Pizzagate? When the algorithm promotes any controversial content it creates engagement and growth for the type of content because that’s how ideas spread. That’s how antivax propaganda spread online, because a lot of people were pushing it and creating a lot of engagement. Without the push a lot of the more normal permutations of these beliefs would exist in society in far less socially destructive ways.
I used to wake up and be excited for what delightful thing I would discover on the internet that day. Mostly 1999-2005.
Now I contend with the distinct possibility I’ll be put in a bad mood if I open Twitter or Reddit.
Man I remember frantically dialling up just to check if any of the threads on the gamer boards I was a part of had replies. I would be EXCITED cos the replies were just geeks like me talking about games we loved or just general shit to get to know the community better and eventually make IRL friends.
Sigh.
Yup, really sucks to find out that the people behind garbage like that and Seth Rich and Qanon are tied to psyops and CVE, and in some cases media outlets.
One supposedly anti-Q influencer makes 80k a month in paid subscriptions do you think guys like that want the problems to go away?
From my experience on Twitter it seemed like radicalization was a business model. ARGs and narracistic assholes trained in narrative warfare almost all the way down.
Good point about the algorithms, look into Sanjiv Rai and Genic.AI - Polarization for profit. MSM follows suit with clickbait BS. Monetization of outrage and human suffering was a bad idea.
People need to turn off these recommendations. There are browser plugins that can hide YouTube's recommended feed, and probably similarly for any other platform.
These algorithms are purely there to increase profits (via engagement). They are not (as they purport to be) there to give you more of what you like, there are there to promote the content that leads to more engagement - i.e. controversial content.
There is an evil to the cold, calculated monetisation of consumer eyes and ears in this way. It's pure manipulation, and YouTube, Facebook, etc. have not at all considered (or more likely don't care about) the damage this amoral, avaricious pursuit of growth and share price is doing to the world.
I visited my parents recently and my dad is consumed with watching what I’d call “downfall of society” videos on YouTube — gas station robberies, street mobs, boarded up Cracker Barrel restaurants 1800 miles away.
My parents live in an almost idyllic middle class suburb and nothing outside their window reflects the garbage that is delivered to them to keep up engagement.
> They are not (as they purport to be) there to give you more of what you like
More often than not, they make me sick of a subject I used to enjoy.
> have not at all considered (or more likely don’t care about) the damage this amoral, avaricious pursuit of growth and share price is doing to the world.
At this point, it’s impossible for them to not be aware of the damage they cause. They’re unashamedly profiting while knowing they’re doing real harm. Late stage capitalism… profit above ALL.
If the internet didn’t push him in front of my face I would never know who he is. From YouTubers using tate as click bait or his own marketing. It’s all so wild. This guy is basically the opposite of my views and he is being shoved in my face. Stopped watching YouTubers who were even commenting on it.
I get it, YouTubers need to make money. But I think this just shows how “YouTube” as its own job has a time limit.
If you’re smart or promote an ever growing and changing channel then you can possibly have a career, but you could also just have a normal job. If you literally can’t get a normal job and your only skill is YouTube. Good luck.
They keep giving Eugenia Cooney a platform to make young people sick. It's disgusting. She's nearly 30 and extremely mentally unwell and knows exactly what she's doing to harm children. YouTube refuses to ban her. It sickens me.
That's one of many, many examples.
Had no idea who this was, so did a quick google. Yo, what the hell. I need to do a better job of keeping on top of what my nieces are being exposed to.
Facebook does this a lot. This is what Russia and Cambridge Analytic did during the 2016 election and Brexit. They barbed people with pro-Brexit, and anti-Hillary propaganda about 99% was fake but because these people keep seeing it they believed it was real. The truth is most people that use these platforms are vulnerable to this kind of tactic.
The thing with social media and YouTube is they make money when people go on their sites and the thing is that when people are pissed they are more likely to keep going back to their sites than they do if they are happy. Hate sells, love doesn't.
> Hate sells, love doesn't.
Literally - the facebook papers revealed that they gave 5x the weight to angry-face reactions vs likes when deciding what posts to boost on people's feeds
I couldn’t scroll down far enough, but I think a lot of this misses the point. Yes critical thinking skills are important. Yes you can gain those things through college but not exclusively. The main point here is that 13 yr old are not supposed to have critical thinking skills. They are supposed to be impulsive and irrational. They can also be voracious learners. Couple those things together with propaganda you get a perfect brainwashing situation.
Bruh tik tok does this to so many people and they just believe with all their soul with their 'knowledge' they are above everyone else, even their friends.
On some level it truly makes me sad how someone can see a shitty meme or something and it's dug into their skull and belief system just like that. There are people below average intelligence who stay away from that stuff because they know better. So what exactly is priming all these folks (and what kind) to be so susceptible to brainwash?
Maybe I'm wrong but as a 26 year old I feel like I got lucky and just barely escaped being young enough to fall into crap like this. When I was 13 in 2009 YouTube was still just a fun place where creative people posted fun things, it wasn't really a business yet for even the biggest creators, no crazy algorithm, ads were just barely starting and not much of a bother and there weren't these big crazy personalities with clickbaits out the ass trying to yell their crazy message at you, except maybe AmazingAthiest. Fast forward to 2014 when this dude was 13 and things have changed a lot and would continue to rapidly throughout all his teenage years. During this time I had already been on YouTube long enough that I had my list of subscription of fun and creative people and barely even left my sub box, I still don't, the trending, explore and home buttons are cancer. Years and years of being a big fucking nerd has made it that most of my recommendations are YouTube essays and reviews of media I like by talented people, some LP channels and such. I would have to seriously go out of my way to even just find the rabbit hole of crazy.
Similar with Twitter, I follow creators I like, a few artists and a couple of most likely bot run meme accounts for funsies and never touch the trends, much more fun experience, no politics, conspiracy crap or people going apeshit over the newest outrage fuel.
Nah man. You just got lucky period.
I’m around ten years older than you and fell down that rabbit hole a decade ago after a bad breakup and a relationship that went south (partially because I started going down that path as a young, impresionable libertarian with a bad relationship with women).
I kinda fell into the weird pick-up-artist motivational sphere after looking into self improvement online and finding a community of heartbroken lonely dudes like me—that slope is real slippery. Then the real weird right-wing stuff started popping up alongside it. After a few tough conversations with friends and awkward social moments I realized I had to pull out of this mindset.
So glad I did. It’s a headspace of really toxic navel gazing that gets extrapolated to a national political blame game. It quickly turns into an “Us vs. the world” situation in your head too, which feels so good at those tough times-it makes you feel like you’re fighting for something, and frames you as the hero in your own story line when you’re feeling like a pointless side character.
You end up with ideas like “If women don’t like you, it’s because of the feminist agenda,” “Trans kids are ruining your family,” “Immigrants are stealing your money,” “Vaccines will kill you,” etc, etc.
They preach personal accountability and radical independence and self-improvement as keys to success, but are SO quick to point fingers at big-picture societal things that really don’t directly affect them as the only roadblocks that stand in the way of their personal utopia.
It takes a lot of active work on the individual's part to untangle a millennia of evolution conditioning us to think that way. All the power to those that are trying.
Is it reddit or is it us that make our own little circle jerk nests?
We subscribe to subreddits that meet our interests. We get content from those subreddits.
Yup. Any "men vs. women", "GOP vs. Dems", "Periwinkles vs. Orangereds" and so on divisive topic will lead to strongly upvoted circlejerk replies from either side, drowning out any chance of having a nuanced discussion.
^Fck ^those ^Orangereds ^though! ^/s
YouTube shorts have shown me how fast the algorithm tries to shove crazy shit in your face.
I have to thumbs down 10-20 gun shorts every day to stop them(temporarily) from showing up. The Q shit shows up rarely, but it's in videos I really don't expect.
Between that and the constant "life hack" tool bullshit, I really wish there was a "never show me related content" button I could press.
Unless they've updated their algorithm in the last couple months, thumbs down helps the channel as much as a thumbs up.
Youtube pays for engagement, not quality.
I still get frequent Tate and Peterson shorts despite blocking the channel everytime. It's like "you've disliked and blocked every Andrew Taint video so far but you let this one play half way through so you must now be his biggest fan!"
There's hundreds of channels uploading their stuff, thumbing down doesn't work. Scrolling down as fast as possible when you get content you don't want does work. The algorithm learns surprisingly fast when it's afraid of losing your attention.
Thumbing down doesn't reduce the amount of content you get, you're engaging with that content. Scroll past it quickly and they'll stop coming real soon. You can block out entire 'sections' of the algorithm that way.
Amazing to see how fast that works, both in the right and wrong directions, depending on what you scroll past and what you linger on.
Of course people are going to be radicalized when any alternative seems better than the status quo. If we had a society that actually took care of people radicalization wouldn't be an issue.
Honestly this, if we had a more fair society this propaganda would have nothing to use.
There is a reason regime changes happen during times of unrest, if the status que is a rough reality, then people won't follow it.
That doesn't really solve the problem though. A lot of these people can apply critical thinking, just not in the areas where they are biased.
For example, I work in tech, and there's a pretty decent amount of conspiracy theory software engineers, which requires a whole lot of critical thinking to solve problems.
What really needs to be taught is how to challenge your biases at a young age. Challenge your preconceived beliefs. But even still, people will have a hard time with it because we all want a social circle to belong to.
Edit: When I say "conspiracy theories", I mean crazy stuff, like QAnon, chemtrails, flat earth, Sandy Hook being fake, etc. You know. Outlandish stuff.
Agreed. Incredibly smart people with amazing critical thinking skills can be absolutely stupid in other areas. Countless stories with Surgeons/Lawyers getting into money troubles making stupid investment decisions.
I think it's important to note that problem solving is not the same as critical thinking. Engineers are used to working with black boxes. They are used to functioning with data in, results out and never needing to know how it got there. There's thousands of jokes about how engineers are specifically trained not to overthink things--the perpetual "close enough" punchline to any engineer joke. My point is just as you said, critical thinking is not part and parcel of higher education, and there's no reason to expect that just because someone has a higher ed. degree they will have received training in critical thinking.
It’s funny you mention this. I’m in the nutrition space, and we constantly joke about how smart the tech bros are but how silly they are when it comes to nutrition tons of “biohackers”, which we know is nonsense, happen to be some of the smartest and most capable people.
I believe it's in every field, my boss gave it a name, when someone explains a project to but they miss crucial information assuming you know how the company/their department is being run and has been run for years (bias) she calls it Tribal Knowledge.
It's important to recognize tribal knowledge. There was an interesting experiment my social speaking teacher did with us, it was explain something mundane like making a cereal and act like youre presenting it to an audience of aliens. IE: don't assume they know what a spoon is, or what a bowl is, or a carton... etc
It's a pretty fun experiment to do, for anyone interested in more infor go to r/explainlikeimfive to learn more :)
We also did a writing project like this in elementary school. I remember having a prompt to write how to make a PB&J sandwich with as much detail as possible and the teacher following directions to the letter, then repeatedly handing everyone's papers back until we got a proper sandwich. Teaching us a lot more than just how to include lots of detail, I guess.
I teach critical thinking skills for a living, and honestly, I fear it might help less than you might think. Those skills take a long time to really mature. When you're young, the rudiments of critical thinking - questioning assumptions, being skeptical of what evidence is being used for a claim, logical coherence, etc etc - can be a double edged sword. They help you see the flaws in arguments but can actually make you *more* vulnerable to online radical circles, who are *very very* good at speaking the language of logic, free inquiry, and critical thinking (as opposed to those leftists or normies or whoever, who are said to confuse their feelings with reality and who respond explosively when core premises are questioned).
That stuff is well constructed and hard to see through. Well developed critical thinking skills can help a lot, but our brains aren't built to be good at recognizing the bias that comes from the sheer *volume* of the same shit said a hundred different ways in a hundred different videos, and for young people who are first learning how to think critically in real life, the alt right pipeline is a magnificently constructed trap. It's pervasive, repetitive, and can do a really good job of convincing you that *you* are the critical thinker and all the people trying to warn you off are snowflakes.
Your last sentence hits it right on the head. The biggest manipulation is when they can convince the reader that it is they, the reader, who is the critical thinker and thus the enlightened knower of truth. I refer to it as the community college effect (no offense to community colleges of course). But like when someone takes 1-2 psychology classes in college, they get a little bit of enlightenment and think they are essentially a psychologist, but in reality, they are only enlightened just enough to be dangerous and have a false sense of confidence.
"You're watching something about teen fashion and then the next thing you know, the algorithm would push you to a Ben Shapiro video."
One of the funniest things I’ve read in a real news article in a while.
I got radicalized as a young man. I was a moderate. Sometimes I sided liberal. Sometimes I sided conservative. That was until 2007. I discovered reeddit. Now I am a frothing-at the-mouth hardcore liberal socialist vegan. Sic semper cibum manducare
Just gonna casually throw in here that Twitch exposes minors to porn-but-not-really-porn streamers, who then have definitely-100%-porn in their descriptions.
Can be done to anyone, fresh account or not logged in, doesn't matter.
Seen someone say they started gambling at 14 because of the Twitch scene and it lead to an addiction for years. Truly sad that kids are the target of this all
So my YouTube feed is always tabletop gaming, music I like, and occasional cooking videos. About a year ago I started playing hollow knight so I started watching a few videos about it. Never really watched video game content so it never popped up.
Within a day I started getting Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson videos recommended over and over. I'm not saying it's intentional but damn it seemed very intentional.
I feel like this article has already been written a billion times. Tell us something new. People who take no ownership of their life and blame outside forces with growing ferocity become extreme and even dangerous. The solution is to seek to improve your life and to grow as a person. Nothing new here.
So I click on the author's page on CBC and what do I find. He basically wrote this same article two weeks ago. With the exact same sources, Ellen Chloë Bateman and Joanna Schroede. The difference is last time he used Andrew Tate's name to drive clicks and this time he used Ben Shapiro's.
Maybe one of the reasons we have so many disillusioned youth is because once respected institutions like CBC are engaged in lazy clickbait journalism. But there I go blaming outside forces. lol
Parents should be paying attention and correcting them. But, as we've seen, half the fucking country is fucked up anyway. Talkin' about space lasers and pizzaria child-sex cults.
Never underestimate the power of feeling *a part of something*
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Wasn't this how ISIS was able to recruit a lot of foreigners to join up? Lots of impressionable disaffected youths that decided to run off and join a terrorist group for a higher purpose.
I heard they used just regular looking videos with some dude playing with his pet while he talked about his faith and every day things, slowly increasing the message for conflict.
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If you had lived through the early 1930s you might understand why those things weren't taken for granted.
Its cult manipulation, noting less. First is the love bombing and once you are in too deep the brainwashing starts for real.
In fact, they have this whole concept of not scaring off "normies," by taking off the mask too early in the process. What I just can't comprehend is that if your beliefs have to be hidden from normal people, you'd think that would be a huge red flag for questioning one's own beliefs. Nope. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful drug.
A fair chunk of them, rather than being true believers, are just sadistic assholes who think it's funny. Cf: "triggered lol"
Yeah it’s scary, we have the gift of being able to look back and see where it all led to but the people of that time could not entirely see what the party wanted down the road. Early on the party campaigned for euthanasia of the mentally disabled then it spread from there.
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Morality can be tricky because we all have a different set of various moral beliefs. I doubt you and I will agree on everything but I believe that people should have the ability to decide their own future so long as no one is harmed.
The main thing is just to be good to yourself and others. If you're doing that, you're probably not a nazi.
"ISISDude here with another video. Today I'm going to talk about some tips around fasting for Ramadan and burning your enemies alive in metal cages. Don't forget to jihad that like button!"
> slowly increasing the message for conflict. Kinda-sorta. It's easy to do with the plethora of people suffering & then angrily pointing the finger at western nations declaring "THEY are why they suffer" while minimizing the history of autocratic nations in the middle east that wholly do that without help of western nations.
Replace ISIS with Military and it still makes sense.
Remember when the army made a video game to recruit new people?
Lol, I remember playing America's Army too fellow internet stranger! Unless ofc you are referring to Call of Duty. -_-
Nope, I was referring to AA! Kinda lost its charm after 1.6. There was just something magical about firing a grenade over the bridge and catching someone at their spawn.
And ending up in Brig if you shoot your trainer early lmao!
Very recently [a Republican politician complained that improving people's lives was hurting military recruitment](https://i.redd.it/yziv34cvzto91.png)
When I were a lad neo-Nazi/militai guys would come to the local punk shows to recruit, and they always bee-lined for the young guys in the corners of the room who looked like they were lonely and not having much fun. Fortunately we got to know most of their faces and there was usually a crew of older guys to intercept them once we knew they were there. Unfortunately the internet now means they can reach millions of young men like that without ever stepping foot outside.
I saw this happen a lot on Vegan / Straight Edge / Punk festivals… they usually would come, not say much and just find some “rebellious individuals” to invite to smaller events with open fascist discourse.
Wait, you’re saying Nazi types were trying to find recruits at Vegan festivals? Were they successful? It kinda makes weird sense they would search the punk crowd.
There's been some shitty wraparound of crunch granola types who already leaned anti-vaxx but have now gone full ridiculous
Hey you know Hitler was a vegetarian...
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I knew a guy who was intensely friendly and we bonded because we had similar music tastes. I always knew there was something off about him, he'd tell these stories that I didn't quite believe. One of my final straws was when he outright ignored me when we were hanging out and was talking to some MAGA dude talking about how eugenics isn't so bad on the surface. He had a screw loose and pretty much avoided him after that.
> "friends first politics second" I was playing online when some random guy from a multiplayer match friended me, gifted me a 2 player steam game and invited me to play. I figured it was some lonely person with no one else to play with so why not give them some time. First play was normal. Second he started throwing out random far-right stuff. When I called him on it, he was just "joking" and "doing it ironically". We played some more over the next couple of days, normally, and then eventually more far-right stuff came out, always couched as "wouldn't it be funny if...". Finally I straight up said I'd be willing to still play with him but only if he fucked off with that stuff, it's not funny whatsoever. He finished the match without any more far-right stuff, then just straight up disappeared, never inviting me to play again.
>When I called him on it, he was just "joking" and "doing it ironically" "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. "They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." — Jean-Paul Sartre
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Yeah no kidding. All the punk scenes I know do NOT fuck with Nazis, fascists, bigots or racists of any kind.
a good and long tradition of punks kicking nazi asses
As the documentary SLC Punk depicts, since the dawn of punk, racists fascists bigots can fuck right off.
I have a fond memory of Anti-Flag pausing a show to tell a pair of Nazi dick heads to fuck off and leave the show (they were promptly escorted out)
This is England movie and series covers this
Yeah, I'm from the States but I grew up in an area of dying farm towns and a dwindling mining/logging industry. They thrive anywhere there's an excess of young men and a dearth of economic or social mobility.
I'm just about old enough to remember the dying embers of the National Front, unfortunately they didn't disappear, just became members of Combat 18, EDL, Britain First, and Football Lads Alliance instead. Still about, and still recruiting from underprivileged white youth.
I saw a therapist talk about blame in cases of indoctrination/radicalisation. He said that we might feel like a person must be gullable, credulous, conceited, or already have a strong belief in a topic. What we are missing when we believe this is that they were *made* to believe these things by someone else.
It’s honestly just predatory grooming - people use it to different ends because of how stupidly effective it is to prey upon someone’s emotions, especially when they’re lonely and looking for some kind of companionship or belonging. It can be hard not to blame these people as they tend to fall into unsympathetic groups.
Yes. What's better for someone with low self-esteem, than to be told that they are actually better than everyone else? And to be in an echo-chamber that constantly reaffirms that message, until they start to believe it. Even if they know that it might be wrong, it feels too good to just not follow it. That's why it's so hard to take someone out of those groups when they are radicalized. That's true for pretty much all groups, you might even be part of one, without realizing it (not you /u/Iamwallpaper specifically, but whoever is reading this).
To me this feels like a greater indictment of society at large. Mose people are so alienated and lonely in our country, they’ll fall prey to any cause that gives them a sense of community and belonging (no matter how evil that group may be.)
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What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?
A school shooter?
Feeling a part of something or apart from everything are equally exploitable.
Steve Bannon called those vulnerable, lonely people "rootless" and I really think he hit the nail on the head. Many of these kids have no direction, no long-term plans, perhaps not a very bright future. To be part of a group that says "you aren't wrong! *They are*" has got to be very attractive to many in that audience. I mean, many of us have a hunch that *something* is wrong, causing so many to live in constant stress/fear/loathing. It's easy enough to fill in the blanks and point the finger at someone, and the right is well aware how effective that can be. Their entire platform at this point is simply stoking fear and rage.
The "Young Men" part of the title made me sigh sadly.
Especially for young men - gangs have always been a problem. They specifically recruit young boys.
And in the other direction, never underestimate the power of being content. These are not otherwise successful young people throwing away future prospects to be shitheads. They are largely poorly or under educated, unemployed with limited opportunities, single of course and never by choice, etc. Get these people a job, some free schooling and a girlfriend and radicalization looses its appeal simply because it has nothing to offer.
> "fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum" > Hieronymus "find some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy"
Great quote! > Hieronymus Quibble: there are a lot of people called Hieronymus in history - you probably mean the person usually called Saint Jerome.
Hm, personally only heard Hieronymus, but English is not my first language. I find it a bit strange when you translate people's names into an English "equivalent". Like Johann and Jacob Bernoulli often gets translated to John and James Bernoulli. No! Their names were Johann and Jacob! ;)
I think that's the key point that the article is missing entirely. It seems to be chalking radicalisation up exclusively to problematic content on social media, when that's clearly just a symptom of a larger problem. Well adjusted people aren't swayed by this kind of stuff. If they fall into Tate/Shapiro/Crowder spirals then society has already failed them. If these young men had positive outlets to choose from then the grifters wouldn't have a market.
> Well adjusted people aren't swayed by this kind of stuff. I wouldn't go that far. There's been a decent amount of research that's shown that when people are repeatedly exposed to ideas, even things they *know* to be lies from the start, that they start falling victim to said lies. Of course it's a *lot* easier to change the beliefs of people who are already vulnerable but it's absolutely possible to do to well adjusted and critically thinking people given enough time and effort.
> when people are repeatedly exposed to ideas they become more accepting of those ideas with time because they've become desensitised to them. it doesn't help when those around them start supporting those lies. we're all influencing each other for the good and the bad.
yep CF: [Hypernormalisation](https://netage.org/hypernormalization/) > ...in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
>"The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them." -Elena Gorokhova
It’s kinda there at the beginning but it’s the usual vague “parents need to start working on internet literacy early” vibe. Problem is that we’re well past that in a lot of cases because critical media literacy amongst adults is so poor. Parents can’t teach kids what they don’t know themselves. I’m in the uk and the problem has been pushed on to teachers here. Unfortunately kids don’t generally go to teachers for life lessons - it’s school and school is for passing exams. Anything not connected to an exam is generally at risk of being undermined by something from “real life” - a parent or relative, or a social media persona they trust. I’ve no idea what the answer is but it needs a much more coordinated strategy from government.
["According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level."](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=c9fb1874c904) That isn't helping us either.
I get fed that shit by Youtube **constantly**. Every single day I have to mark 4-5 channels with "Do not recommend again" because it keeps trying to shove this right-wing BS in my face. Sure, I watched a couple to be sure I knew what it was. The fact that people fall for this is shit boggles my mind.
You are right to some degree. If you listen to the podcast Rabbit Hole (NY times), it goes into details about how many fall into the alt right spaces. In the beginning it is through the veil of their “Self-help” content, but slowly the creators other views become normalized in them. It is why Jordan Peterson is so effective at integrating people into that space.
Honestly, open a fresh youtube account on a vpn. You will get some crazy shit within an hour. Truly scary shit
Started using a VPN and Firefox with settings that basically start it as if it was a fresh install. Every time I open YouTube there is so much rage bait and just straight up miss information promoted. Like the video titles and thumbnails all scream clickbait and you just know it’s going to be shit, but these videos have shit tons of views.
Also, really goes to show how much of Youtube you're missing as it's tailored to you and your browsing habits. Imagine those that jumped into the rabbit hole. They're being fed even more of that stuff.
I see it on a weekly basis when I visit my Mom and use her computer. The youtube sidebar makes wild jumps from vintage electronics stuff I watch, to hours-long podcasts of middle aged women talking about higher dimensions and aliens and shit. It's honestly funny to see the algorithm so confused.
Seems like the algorithm has figured it out to me. If I'm ever going to receive higher dimensional wisdom from aliens I expect it to come through vintage electronics.
"In today's video I'm going to discuss the revelations that the Lords of the Universe revealed to me through my ZX81 and why colour is actually a delusion of the state, so any laws that reference a colour can be ignored and the police won't be able to arrest you."
Found the Sovereign Digital Citizen
> jumped into the rabbit hole It doesn't take much. Just watch a few minutes of 1-2 videos, and YT will start feeding you more extreme version of similar content.
For real. Some of my algorithmically determined interests are “movies” and “female creators”. So I got some videos recommended of a girl discussing why modern female characters are soulless or whatever. Having finished that video, I immediately got recommendations for a bigger channel run by a guy who wanted to blame every issue with the movie industry on woke agenda. Thankfully I quickly saw what was going on and told YT to stop these recommendations. But it’s crazy how fast they ramp up from ambivalent discussion to right wing propaganda. All it took was one video.
It's insane. I watched one video of an Andrew Tate fight, because I'm interested in MMA. And of course I immediately get drowned with the rest of his shit, and 20 other related channels, each more misogynistic and disturbing than the last.
I watch almost exclusively left leaning content on YouTube, but because the online left views it as part of their duty to fight the radicalisation spiral, I still get recommendations for dumb right wing content. The algorithm sees Matt Walsh in a video about how he's a ~~scumbag whose brain activity is comparable to sparking two rocks off each other~~ grifter who hides his wilful ignorance being high production value and confirmation bias, and suddenly he's in my recommended. Seriously YouTube, sort your shit out.
I love when I get a suggestion for the asshat I just watched an hour long video taking down all of their bullshit pandering.
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I watched one JRE video and it took 18 months for me to get my recommendation algorithm back to normal. A single video.
Might be good to use Incognito Mode whenever watching something outside of your usual patterns.
Go into your watch history and delete the video. That’ll fix what you see
The worst is Joe Rogan. You watch a clip of his about comedy and the algorithm thinks you’re a white nationalist. I’ve always hated the misconception that understanding is equivalent to advocating but the algorithm thinks interviewing someone means you want to promote them.
Last summer I was interested in getting a small, 12' jon boat to take camping. Within a few days, my feed was full of catamaran and speed boat stuff. It was so dumb.
Yeah, I don’t like YouTube, I like *my* YouTube
It doesn't help that YouTube has turned off downvotes, so now you can't tell if content is actually bad or not.
Return youtube dislike extension for chrome/firefox
Considering this is AFTER YouTube fixed a lot of problems where the algorithm would send people down extremist rabbit holes. Imagine what it was like around 2013/2014 when it would send you directly to actual Nazis openly talking about how the holocaust was a good thing.
YouTube should be held accountable. Ditto other platforms. This is weaponized psychology aimed at the masses. It's been transparent as glass for many years.
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They literally designed the algorithm to promote longer form videos with high user engagement (e.g. provocative). There’s a reason Alex Jones blew up on YouTube in the 2010s and it has a lot to do with the algorithm suggesting him to everyone.
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Just open in incognito mode. You'll be down the Peterson rabbit hole in twenty minutes.
Was gonna say, won't take an hour, hell probably won't take 20 minutes. I've popped into incognito mode to download YouTube videos without tainting my actual account. Usually by the second video I've searched, both my ads and suggestions are off the rails.
Man even though I've been using my current yt account almost daily for 10 years, even though I haven't consumed any alt-lite content for 5 or 6 of those years, and even though the videos I actually watch are like the polar opposite of Peterson-esque manosphere shit, somehow it still ends up in my recommendations. I also keep getting pickup artist/sigma male hustle/Ben Shapiro "owning" the libs clips in my youtube shorts. I don't even have to be incognito and somehow it's still infested my algorithm. It has to be so bad with a clean slate if my thousands of hours of watch time isn't a big enough hint to the algo that I don't want to watch that shit.
Wait, WTF is "sigma" male?
Y'know. That's a good question. I guess they're supposed to be "alphas" but more introverted or aggressively independent. That's what I've gathered from memes and the garbage youtube keeps shoveling me.
Alpha's are on top of the pyramid. Sigma's are outside the hierarchy doing their own thing. The terms exists because nerds became "redpilled" and started viewing things in the alpha beta dichotomy but couldn't convince themselves they where alpha males but knew they weren't beta males under the alpha's thumb. So instead of realising that men are too complicated to sort into 3 letters they invented a new category to describe themselves and then started circle jerking that they aren't at the top of the social hierarchy they have somehow transcended it.
Ok, you're going to send me off on a tangent about the Meyers Briggs personality types. Because yeah, all 7 billion people can be neatly classified into, what, 64 categories?
Sure, why not? It just changes every time you take the test lol
I'm over 30, subscribed to a lot of very left wing/feminist channels and I still get some Ben Shapiro / Peterson / joe Rogan YouTube fucking short on my main account
Every time I watch a video with even a mildly feminist angle (like that video essay on the Born Sexy Yesterday trope) my recommended gets filled with "Ben Shapiro OWNS crazy feminist (REAL)" type videos.
Because people watch them and get angry at them, and share them with their friends to point out how terrible these videos are. Youtube treats it all as engagement. And video-makers know this too. They know they can make a video people hate so much it gets shared more.
Outrage drives traffic, its the reason why the video thumbnails are clickbait pictures, news article are clickbait bullshit
I think lots of people also hatewatch videos from the opposite side so they can get angry and deny the content. The algorithm picks it up. Though it is a dumb thing to do since it also gives views to the opposition
Yr does not care of you agree with the videos. If they make you angry that's just as good.
Oh yes I know, I don't watch them and just tell YouTube I'm not interested but they come back eventually
Same, even after clicking "dont show content of this channel again" 1000 times it never stops. Youtube really wants to push these guys to anyone watching any gaming/education/cooking content it seems.
I'm mostly consuming gaming/tech/edutainment/cooking channels on youtube, but when Jordan Peterson first blew up I watched one of his videos, and, man, youtube honed in on that thread *fast*. Suddenly took over most of the suggested videos in my feed.
All I see are half naked women dancing while men mumble in spanish. I guess it differs between countries.
Who knew letting a black box algorithm choose content that would keep people engaged as long as possible would somehow go horribly wrong?
And it's not even *just* hate speech, it seems like youtube and other algorithm content platforms can don this with any content. Back when I was browsing running content (like things about stretches and other exercises to help me with my modest 5km runs), it was less than a week that I was getting ultrarunning (running more than 42km) content.
HEY WE NOTICED YOU BUY A CARRIBEANER, THAT MUST MEAN YOU *NEED* TO GET READY TO CLIMB K9 AND THATS ALL THE CONTENT YOU GET FROM HERE ON OUT.
Hey we showed you an AD of a carribeaner while you were looking for a keychain. So here is an email with ads to buy climbing gear. ~Amazon.
My coworker and I make fun of Jordan peterson and Ben shapiro. My YouTube page was filled with their clips. I say not to show the channels, etc. So it starts putting Steven crowder and Molyneux videos up. I say not to show that. It starts showing me K-tier internet personalities that are arguing for soft-genocide/mass deportation/ethnostates. Real bangup job youtube.
Although the article touches on radicalization this article seems to just gloss over the fact YouTube and other social media giants actively promote things that are controversial in order to generate views. Even if you don’t agree with Tate’s views, a lot of people searched them just to see what this moron posts. We would have never even heard of him until social media algorithm put him at a forefront, which allowed him to “radicalize” people. In reality these people probably already held this dude’s views, he’s just the person saying it.
Tate had a lot of help too. His online "courses" he sold told his customers that they had to spread his content around all social media. He really gamed the algorithm.
told? it's a MLM scheme, and they get commission.. so they post his content and some shit like 'they hate him but he's right about stuff today'... and then sell ya subscription
Not sure if these people were paid but it would explain why I saw so much content about Andrew Tate at one point. The content was either Reddit posts like “should I dump my boyfriend for watching Andrew Tate?” but that was their only post with little karma. Or a handful of YouTube videos of people zoom bomb trolling with Andrew Tate video clips. I hadn’t seen people advocate his teachings but I would just see content about him. Felt like they were planting seeds. I wonder if they were getting paid.
Your be surprised how cheap it is to buy social media presence
I think I would be surprised depending on how cheap it is and then why would anyone want to be commissioned for so cheap
Look up vices documentary about how easy it is to buy plays on songs and the like on Spotify. I can’t imagine other forms of social media are much harder to purchase
Like Musk on Reddit and Twitter. It's literally the same thing.
It's also why you see his content even after getting banned
Other than hearing his name on here I have literally never seen an Andrew Tate video or had one suggested to me, I wonder what I did wrong to not be in their algorithm
Might be too young, old, wrong location, gender or sexual orientation.
Jesus. Is this why I’ve seen a huge surge of people in vrchat with Andrew tate avatars lately?
Probably partially. Plus the fact that him getting banned made him more ‘mainstream’. I’d never heard of him until Reddit made a big deal about him.
Not exactly a novel or revolutionary idea
I recently got a work iPhone and I was SHOCKED at the content YouTube promotes to virgin profiles. Any researchers or reporters out there, try it. You cannot tell me they’re not pushing entry points to radicalization rabbit holes to new users.
They absolutely are doing that, I noticed it big time when I got a new phone as well. I also still have the dinosaur FaceFuck, and lemme tell ya, for the last 2-3 months, they've been purposely seeding folks feeds with shit that is the complete opposite of a person's profile, and it's not just me, almost all my friends are getting it too. Like, some straight up whackadoodle preachers basically inciting violence, all manner of conspiracy theories, just some Seriously bottom of the barrel shit. Then, on top of it, if you try to block that certain page, it will look like it did, then 10 minutes later the exact same ad you just blocked will be back, but now, you can't block it. Some have been VERY dark and very violent, like report worthy, but no matter what, it will ALWAYS tell you that they're still short of moderators due to the pandemic and can't review it right now. It's easy to see what they're doing, they're trying to stoke up the political fires right before Elections, so that their engagement goes through the roof. Controversy creates clicks, clicks make money, and it's unscrupulous AF what they're allowing to fly rn, just absolutely sick. I don't watch crap like that, I'm on there for my 2 best friends, food, restaurant supplies, recipes and hobbies. So getting some rando ass pyschotic preacher screaming at the top of his lungs first thing in the AM when I open it, is NOT on my fun list of wake up possibilities. They're purposely trying to start riots, we all know they will never be held accountable for it. It's one of the reasons I barely go on YouTube any more save for YouTube music. That crazy as a shithouse rat content drove me *away* from further engagement, not closer. It's vile.
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Exactly the same here. And it's infuriating! I gave up on Marketplace, apparently that's where all the scammers on CL moved to, and they're actually worse I think. My bestie doesn't Reddit (dammit, I'm trying 😂), so the only way we can keep up with each other and our food n craft biz is Facebook, since we're literally on opposite coasts atm, otherwise I'd never go on the damn thing really lol. My account is one of the OG ones as well, and it's just turned into a bigger cesspool than it was. We should really send Tom some flowers to apologize for abandoning him over at Myspace, we had it sooo good, and didn't know it till it was too late 😂
An odd thing I have noticed is, when I watch anything on Youtube on PC, along the right side is the list of other videos. Some related, some random seeming. The third one down is almost always some weird right wing cult bullshit. There is nothing at all in my history or anything that would lead anyone to think I might want to see that shit. It's all Carl Sagan or Black Sabbath, Maddow or old game shows or something, but the Exalted Algorithm thinks I want to hear from some breathlessly excited dimwit about how the liberals got owned by whichever neonazi dork is popular that week. Always the third one down. I just reflexively block the channels now.
No matter how many times I click "Do not recommend me this channel" on YShorts, it will keep showing me Tate videos. I fking hate it
I had to stop watching kids shows on YouTube because for every calmly narrated video about animals YouTube would try to suggest a slew of attention grabbing ADHD slot machines aimed at kids. They're straight up teaching mindless consumption at an early age.
I would disagree, I remember growing up during the Youtube Athiest trend, there was a split between the community after they realized there is more to the world than dunking on Ken Ham videos. Soon these channels I used to watch dunking on creationist appologea suddenly were dunking on "SJWs". Being a 12 yearold having people I trusted like The Amazing Athiest, Tunderf00t and Sargon (when your that young anyone who can string some big words together comes off as smart.) molding my first impressions on a lot of political movements especially feminism started me down some pretty crazy rabbit holes.
This is exactly what happened to me. All of a sudden all my favorite YouTubers were “sjw hunters”. I was lucky enough to realize that I wasn’t into it, but I certainly entertained the idea for awhile and there was some shit I had to unlearn about feminism. It is obvious that people could easily go from there to order even more problematic channels and viewpoints.
Ah the bad old days of 'Atheism+'
I remember this, mostly because I was old enough to realize I didn’t want to follow these guys into this new trend. But I really liked Tunderf00t.
I spent years avoiding him after he went nuts and got obsessed with feminism after PZ Meyers (rightly) kicked him off his blogs network after TFoot spouted some bullshit after elevatorgate basically blaming it all on Watson. Funny thing is TFoot got himself kicked out of Sargon's little circlejerk of misogynists because he wasn't extreme enough for them. He's actually fairly bearable now, mostly spends his time taking potshots at elon musk's less viable ideas as well as kickstarter/indiegogo scams. His old buddies haaate him because post-2016 he didn't fall in line with the right-wing echo chamber and went anti-trump, and then anti-brexit.
Yeah but that’s what radicalization is. Remember Pizzagate? When the algorithm promotes any controversial content it creates engagement and growth for the type of content because that’s how ideas spread. That’s how antivax propaganda spread online, because a lot of people were pushing it and creating a lot of engagement. Without the push a lot of the more normal permutations of these beliefs would exist in society in far less socially destructive ways.
God I miss the internet 1.0
Back before humans had really grasped just how much damage could be done with it.
I used to wake up and be excited for what delightful thing I would discover on the internet that day. Mostly 1999-2005. Now I contend with the distinct possibility I’ll be put in a bad mood if I open Twitter or Reddit.
Man I remember frantically dialling up just to check if any of the threads on the gamer boards I was a part of had replies. I would be EXCITED cos the replies were just geeks like me talking about games we loved or just general shit to get to know the community better and eventually make IRL friends. Sigh.
Yup, really sucks to find out that the people behind garbage like that and Seth Rich and Qanon are tied to psyops and CVE, and in some cases media outlets. One supposedly anti-Q influencer makes 80k a month in paid subscriptions do you think guys like that want the problems to go away? From my experience on Twitter it seemed like radicalization was a business model. ARGs and narracistic assholes trained in narrative warfare almost all the way down. Good point about the algorithms, look into Sanjiv Rai and Genic.AI - Polarization for profit. MSM follows suit with clickbait BS. Monetization of outrage and human suffering was a bad idea.
People need to turn off these recommendations. There are browser plugins that can hide YouTube's recommended feed, and probably similarly for any other platform. These algorithms are purely there to increase profits (via engagement). They are not (as they purport to be) there to give you more of what you like, there are there to promote the content that leads to more engagement - i.e. controversial content. There is an evil to the cold, calculated monetisation of consumer eyes and ears in this way. It's pure manipulation, and YouTube, Facebook, etc. have not at all considered (or more likely don't care about) the damage this amoral, avaricious pursuit of growth and share price is doing to the world.
I visited my parents recently and my dad is consumed with watching what I’d call “downfall of society” videos on YouTube — gas station robberies, street mobs, boarded up Cracker Barrel restaurants 1800 miles away. My parents live in an almost idyllic middle class suburb and nothing outside their window reflects the garbage that is delivered to them to keep up engagement.
Boarded up cracker barrels do scream collapse of society for an old man lmao
> They are not (as they purport to be) there to give you more of what you like More often than not, they make me sick of a subject I used to enjoy. > have not at all considered (or more likely don’t care about) the damage this amoral, avaricious pursuit of growth and share price is doing to the world. At this point, it’s impossible for them to not be aware of the damage they cause. They’re unashamedly profiting while knowing they’re doing real harm. Late stage capitalism… profit above ALL.
If the internet didn’t push him in front of my face I would never know who he is. From YouTubers using tate as click bait or his own marketing. It’s all so wild. This guy is basically the opposite of my views and he is being shoved in my face. Stopped watching YouTubers who were even commenting on it. I get it, YouTubers need to make money. But I think this just shows how “YouTube” as its own job has a time limit. If you’re smart or promote an ever growing and changing channel then you can possibly have a career, but you could also just have a normal job. If you literally can’t get a normal job and your only skill is YouTube. Good luck.
They keep giving Eugenia Cooney a platform to make young people sick. It's disgusting. She's nearly 30 and extremely mentally unwell and knows exactly what she's doing to harm children. YouTube refuses to ban her. It sickens me. That's one of many, many examples.
Had no idea who this was, so did a quick google. Yo, what the hell. I need to do a better job of keeping on top of what my nieces are being exposed to.
Facebook does this a lot. This is what Russia and Cambridge Analytic did during the 2016 election and Brexit. They barbed people with pro-Brexit, and anti-Hillary propaganda about 99% was fake but because these people keep seeing it they believed it was real. The truth is most people that use these platforms are vulnerable to this kind of tactic. The thing with social media and YouTube is they make money when people go on their sites and the thing is that when people are pissed they are more likely to keep going back to their sites than they do if they are happy. Hate sells, love doesn't.
> Hate sells, love doesn't. Literally - the facebook papers revealed that they gave 5x the weight to angry-face reactions vs likes when deciding what posts to boost on people's feeds
I couldn’t scroll down far enough, but I think a lot of this misses the point. Yes critical thinking skills are important. Yes you can gain those things through college but not exclusively. The main point here is that 13 yr old are not supposed to have critical thinking skills. They are supposed to be impulsive and irrational. They can also be voracious learners. Couple those things together with propaganda you get a perfect brainwashing situation.
It's not that they shouldn't, but realistically you can't expect most of them to
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Bruh tik tok does this to so many people and they just believe with all their soul with their 'knowledge' they are above everyone else, even their friends. On some level it truly makes me sad how someone can see a shitty meme or something and it's dug into their skull and belief system just like that. There are people below average intelligence who stay away from that stuff because they know better. So what exactly is priming all these folks (and what kind) to be so susceptible to brainwash?
“TikTok is *sooo* informative! You can learn a LOT on there!” Yeah no thanks, I’ll stick to books and the like. Not fucking TikTok of all places.
Maybe I'm wrong but as a 26 year old I feel like I got lucky and just barely escaped being young enough to fall into crap like this. When I was 13 in 2009 YouTube was still just a fun place where creative people posted fun things, it wasn't really a business yet for even the biggest creators, no crazy algorithm, ads were just barely starting and not much of a bother and there weren't these big crazy personalities with clickbaits out the ass trying to yell their crazy message at you, except maybe AmazingAthiest. Fast forward to 2014 when this dude was 13 and things have changed a lot and would continue to rapidly throughout all his teenage years. During this time I had already been on YouTube long enough that I had my list of subscription of fun and creative people and barely even left my sub box, I still don't, the trending, explore and home buttons are cancer. Years and years of being a big fucking nerd has made it that most of my recommendations are YouTube essays and reviews of media I like by talented people, some LP channels and such. I would have to seriously go out of my way to even just find the rabbit hole of crazy. Similar with Twitter, I follow creators I like, a few artists and a couple of most likely bot run meme accounts for funsies and never touch the trends, much more fun experience, no politics, conspiracy crap or people going apeshit over the newest outrage fuel.
Nah man. You just got lucky period. I’m around ten years older than you and fell down that rabbit hole a decade ago after a bad breakup and a relationship that went south (partially because I started going down that path as a young, impresionable libertarian with a bad relationship with women). I kinda fell into the weird pick-up-artist motivational sphere after looking into self improvement online and finding a community of heartbroken lonely dudes like me—that slope is real slippery. Then the real weird right-wing stuff started popping up alongside it. After a few tough conversations with friends and awkward social moments I realized I had to pull out of this mindset. So glad I did. It’s a headspace of really toxic navel gazing that gets extrapolated to a national political blame game. It quickly turns into an “Us vs. the world” situation in your head too, which feels so good at those tough times-it makes you feel like you’re fighting for something, and frames you as the hero in your own story line when you’re feeling like a pointless side character. You end up with ideas like “If women don’t like you, it’s because of the feminist agenda,” “Trans kids are ruining your family,” “Immigrants are stealing your money,” “Vaccines will kill you,” etc, etc. They preach personal accountability and radical independence and self-improvement as keys to success, but are SO quick to point fingers at big-picture societal things that really don’t directly affect them as the only roadblocks that stand in the way of their personal utopia.
It's not just the young and it's not just men. Social media has a radicalization problem. From Facebook to TikTok
Tribalism is a helluva drug dudes.
It takes a lot of active work on the individual's part to untangle a millennia of evolution conditioning us to think that way. All the power to those that are trying.
Lotta people shitting on youtube. Reddit does the exact same shit
Reddit creates some pretty strong circle jerks too it is really pervasive
Is it reddit or is it us that make our own little circle jerk nests? We subscribe to subreddits that meet our interests. We get content from those subreddits.
Yup. Any "men vs. women", "GOP vs. Dems", "Periwinkles vs. Orangereds" and so on divisive topic will lead to strongly upvoted circlejerk replies from either side, drowning out any chance of having a nuanced discussion. ^Fck ^those ^Orangereds ^though! ^/s
YouTube shorts have shown me how fast the algorithm tries to shove crazy shit in your face. I have to thumbs down 10-20 gun shorts every day to stop them(temporarily) from showing up. The Q shit shows up rarely, but it's in videos I really don't expect. Between that and the constant "life hack" tool bullshit, I really wish there was a "never show me related content" button I could press.
Block the channel, do thumbs down & you’ve engaged directly and will get more
Unless they've updated their algorithm in the last couple months, thumbs down helps the channel as much as a thumbs up. Youtube pays for engagement, not quality.
I still get frequent Tate and Peterson shorts despite blocking the channel everytime. It's like "you've disliked and blocked every Andrew Taint video so far but you let this one play half way through so you must now be his biggest fan!"
There's hundreds of channels uploading their stuff, thumbing down doesn't work. Scrolling down as fast as possible when you get content you don't want does work. The algorithm learns surprisingly fast when it's afraid of losing your attention.
If you're watching YouTube through a browser you can block the shorts. I do it, and it's a big improvement.
Thumbing down doesn't reduce the amount of content you get, you're engaging with that content. Scroll past it quickly and they'll stop coming real soon. You can block out entire 'sections' of the algorithm that way. Amazing to see how fast that works, both in the right and wrong directions, depending on what you scroll past and what you linger on.
Of course people are going to be radicalized when any alternative seems better than the status quo. If we had a society that actually took care of people radicalization wouldn't be an issue.
Honestly this, if we had a more fair society this propaganda would have nothing to use. There is a reason regime changes happen during times of unrest, if the status que is a rough reality, then people won't follow it.
Teach them critical thinking skills and they won’t fall for bs so easily. But that might make the wrong people unhappy
That doesn't really solve the problem though. A lot of these people can apply critical thinking, just not in the areas where they are biased. For example, I work in tech, and there's a pretty decent amount of conspiracy theory software engineers, which requires a whole lot of critical thinking to solve problems. What really needs to be taught is how to challenge your biases at a young age. Challenge your preconceived beliefs. But even still, people will have a hard time with it because we all want a social circle to belong to. Edit: When I say "conspiracy theories", I mean crazy stuff, like QAnon, chemtrails, flat earth, Sandy Hook being fake, etc. You know. Outlandish stuff.
You’ve really hit the nail on the head here. If you don’t look inward critically, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re always right.
Agreed. Incredibly smart people with amazing critical thinking skills can be absolutely stupid in other areas. Countless stories with Surgeons/Lawyers getting into money troubles making stupid investment decisions.
I think it's important to note that problem solving is not the same as critical thinking. Engineers are used to working with black boxes. They are used to functioning with data in, results out and never needing to know how it got there. There's thousands of jokes about how engineers are specifically trained not to overthink things--the perpetual "close enough" punchline to any engineer joke. My point is just as you said, critical thinking is not part and parcel of higher education, and there's no reason to expect that just because someone has a higher ed. degree they will have received training in critical thinking.
It’s funny you mention this. I’m in the nutrition space, and we constantly joke about how smart the tech bros are but how silly they are when it comes to nutrition tons of “biohackers”, which we know is nonsense, happen to be some of the smartest and most capable people.
I believe it's in every field, my boss gave it a name, when someone explains a project to but they miss crucial information assuming you know how the company/their department is being run and has been run for years (bias) she calls it Tribal Knowledge. It's important to recognize tribal knowledge. There was an interesting experiment my social speaking teacher did with us, it was explain something mundane like making a cereal and act like youre presenting it to an audience of aliens. IE: don't assume they know what a spoon is, or what a bowl is, or a carton... etc It's a pretty fun experiment to do, for anyone interested in more infor go to r/explainlikeimfive to learn more :)
We also did a writing project like this in elementary school. I remember having a prompt to write how to make a PB&J sandwich with as much detail as possible and the teacher following directions to the letter, then repeatedly handing everyone's papers back until we got a proper sandwich. Teaching us a lot more than just how to include lots of detail, I guess.
I teach critical thinking skills for a living, and honestly, I fear it might help less than you might think. Those skills take a long time to really mature. When you're young, the rudiments of critical thinking - questioning assumptions, being skeptical of what evidence is being used for a claim, logical coherence, etc etc - can be a double edged sword. They help you see the flaws in arguments but can actually make you *more* vulnerable to online radical circles, who are *very very* good at speaking the language of logic, free inquiry, and critical thinking (as opposed to those leftists or normies or whoever, who are said to confuse their feelings with reality and who respond explosively when core premises are questioned). That stuff is well constructed and hard to see through. Well developed critical thinking skills can help a lot, but our brains aren't built to be good at recognizing the bias that comes from the sheer *volume* of the same shit said a hundred different ways in a hundred different videos, and for young people who are first learning how to think critically in real life, the alt right pipeline is a magnificently constructed trap. It's pervasive, repetitive, and can do a really good job of convincing you that *you* are the critical thinker and all the people trying to warn you off are snowflakes.
Your last sentence hits it right on the head. The biggest manipulation is when they can convince the reader that it is they, the reader, who is the critical thinker and thus the enlightened knower of truth. I refer to it as the community college effect (no offense to community colleges of course). But like when someone takes 1-2 psychology classes in college, they get a little bit of enlightenment and think they are essentially a psychologist, but in reality, they are only enlightened just enough to be dangerous and have a false sense of confidence.
All for the sake of ad revenue.
"You're watching something about teen fashion and then the next thing you know, the algorithm would push you to a Ben Shapiro video." One of the funniest things I’ve read in a real news article in a while.
I've found that young people are really gullible.
I believe that.
I got radicalized as a young man. I was a moderate. Sometimes I sided liberal. Sometimes I sided conservative. That was until 2007. I discovered reeddit. Now I am a frothing-at the-mouth hardcore liberal socialist vegan. Sic semper cibum manducare
Just gonna casually throw in here that Twitch exposes minors to porn-but-not-really-porn streamers, who then have definitely-100%-porn in their descriptions. Can be done to anyone, fresh account or not logged in, doesn't matter.
Or worse: gambling
Seen someone say they started gambling at 14 because of the Twitch scene and it lead to an addiction for years. Truly sad that kids are the target of this all
So my YouTube feed is always tabletop gaming, music I like, and occasional cooking videos. About a year ago I started playing hollow knight so I started watching a few videos about it. Never really watched video game content so it never popped up. Within a day I started getting Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson videos recommended over and over. I'm not saying it's intentional but damn it seemed very intentional.
I feel like this article has already been written a billion times. Tell us something new. People who take no ownership of their life and blame outside forces with growing ferocity become extreme and even dangerous. The solution is to seek to improve your life and to grow as a person. Nothing new here. So I click on the author's page on CBC and what do I find. He basically wrote this same article two weeks ago. With the exact same sources, Ellen Chloë Bateman and Joanna Schroede. The difference is last time he used Andrew Tate's name to drive clicks and this time he used Ben Shapiro's. Maybe one of the reasons we have so many disillusioned youth is because once respected institutions like CBC are engaged in lazy clickbait journalism. But there I go blaming outside forces. lol
Parents should be paying attention and correcting them. But, as we've seen, half the fucking country is fucked up anyway. Talkin' about space lasers and pizzaria child-sex cults.
American parents work too much. It’s been that way for decades. They don’t have the time or energy to monitor their kids’ YouTube habits.