If you don’t know who you are, someone will surely be ready to tell you what to become — especially if you’re young and online.
To be male and youthful in the modern era is to be oblivious to your potential while naïve about industries that profit from selling you illusions of happiness through materialism, nihilism because feminism is an enemy combatant and subordination to a supposedly influential and heroic male figure.
The Post’s Asia Grace experimented with the Chinese-owned social-media platform TikTok and Google’s YouTube, the world’s second-most-popular website, by creating a fake profile posing as a 14-year-old boy named Jayden to gauge what kind of content is directed at this demographic.
What she found “terrified” her.
In less than a minute on both platforms, “Jayden” was inundated with streams of videos of girls lip-syncing and twerking that soon manifested into more violent and offensive content, like a video of online personality Andrew Tate laughing at the thought of stoning a Muslim woman to death for standing up to her husband.
Asia Grace experimented with TikTok and Google’s YouTube — pretending to be a 14-year-old boy — to see what kind of content the algorithm she would be given.SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
She was also subjected to more hateful content disguised as “dark humor” talking about killing orphans, hanging black people and mocking Asian accents.
This revelation of targeted degeneracy aimed directly at our young men — plus the knowledge that 93% of US males ages 13 to 25 have YouTube accounts and 62% are on TikTok — would make any parent of a Gen Zer worry about how this sick stuff may be affecting their children.
As much as we may dislike what’s being targeted at young men, the algorithms work in part by feeding that demographic content they’re already interested in.
So why are they keen on shockingly offensive videos and avid consumers of flawed male influencers?
Part of the answer, I believe, is that such content is considered counterculture; these influencers are doing the taboo things you’re not supposed to do and saying the taboo things you’re not supposed to say.
In less than a minute on TikTok and Youtube, “Jayden” was given streams showing videos of girls lip-syncing and twerking — then violent crime clips. Andrew Tate/YouTube
They are risking becoming social pariahs by going against the grain — and this is attractive to young men, as they tend to be drawn to risky behavior.
When I was younger, I knew we weren’t supposed to admit we laughed uncontrollably at Beavis and Butt-Head’s crude jokes, and we pretended we didn’t watch every episode of MTV’s “Jackass” because we knew our parents hated these shows.
Games like Mortal Kombat were supposed to make us more violent, and listening to music like Marilyn Manson would allegedly turn us all into school shooters.
But the difference between what I experienced in my teenage years and what our Gen Z young men are facing is the multitude and variations of content they are capable of consuming on a daily basis — it’s much more influential than yesteryear.
Our young men are faced with an algorithmically never-ending stream of shocking content, whereas “Beavis and Butt-Head” came on once a week.
Young men are faced with streams of violent and shocking content daily on platforms, whereas “Beavis and Butt-Head” came on once a week.MTV/Paramount+
To compound the problem, our young men are increasingly growing up in environments deprived of the most important male figure to help guide them in an ever-confusing world: their fathers.
The United States ranks No. 1 in the world in children growing up in single-parent homes, according to Pew Research Institute: This is the circumstance for nearly a quarter (23%) of our children.
Our young men are supposed to spend their formative years being instructed on how to become healthy, stoic and appropriately masculine men by someone who is invested in them reaching their potential.
Instead, too many are left lost, seeking consultation from caricatures of manhood who behave like sexual and materialistic perverts.
Our lost boys are being led astray because the family unit in America has been decaying for years and the instruction throughout their childhoods by the men they’re supposed to mimic has been recklessly set as optional.
As the father of a Gen Z boy, I understand that I’m the manhood barometer for my son, and my consistent involvement in his life can’t be overwritten by the Andrew Tates of the world.
For years I prepared him to watch out for people like Tate and made him aware of the industries of manipulation and confusion that social-media platforms profit from because protecting him is my job as his father, not social media’s.
Social-media platforms weren’t designed to care about the outcomes of our children. Parents were.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/03/10/why-youtube-and-tiktok-target-our-young-men-with-degeneracy/