Yesterday, as I was scrolling on social media through my past comments and repost history, I discovered a comment from 2021 of myself commenting “owned” on a video of Ben Shapiro discussing young girls joining the then-named Boy Scouts of America, which is now simply named Scouting America. The comments of the video were filled with people, most prominently younger men and boys, mocking and ridiculing the person who asked Shapiro the question.
Shapiro is an American conservative commentator often attributed as one of the primary contributors to the young “alt-right pipeline” that is found on the internet today. The Associated Press defines the “alt-right” as “a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States.” The pipeline refers to a process of radicalization driven by the internet that exposes users, most prominently young men, to initially-seeming harmless content that gradually nudges them towards extremist anti-feminist and often white supremacist ideologies.
I, like many others, was deeply influenced in my middle-schooled years by this algorithmic indoctrination to believe in similar ideas. My social feeds were almost entirely composed of videos of Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson “owning liberals” and I ate them up every time.
What I did not realize then is that this was not entirely my own fault; it was the fault of the exploitation of my confused, youthful identity done by the gaming of social media algorithms. And what else I have noticed in the years past since then is that the same impact is being had more and more to people on the internet.
In fact, I even see the same things and ideologies being held by students in high school, whether it being my own close friends making choices to “avoid the foids” or a student in one of my classes calling someone “way too smart to be feminist.” I have heard throughout the year stories of the freshman boys becoming more and more conflictive and inflammatory towards their teachers as years pass. These are, obviously, not coincidences; the pipeline and deterioration of youth for young men is strong to this day.
While I do not hold the solution for this great problem to “save the next generation,” I believe that it is important to see that there is another side, that there is a light past the tunnel, that there is a future where this does not happen. However, in the current state of social media algorithms and young men’s youth, it seems this is a far and maybe doubtful future.
