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I think you are largely correct about the state of things, except that it’s not just women. The rise of social media and thus social media politics is very radicalizing. This works in both directions, to the point that I’d suggest that there is a correlation between time spent on political social media (and later activism) and radicalism. It works by creating a tight feedback loop that rewards people for saying the most radical versions of what they believe, and for liking and sharing that content. This is made worse by the filter bubbles that feed content that affirms the politics you hold and paints your out group as evil and stupid and possibly subhuman.
The problem with this is that only one set of these communities is seen as the problem. Male and conservative communities are constantly being considered as radicalized communities of potentially dangerous individuals who are going to be violent or totalitarian. The other side gets a complete pass. Mainstreamish media can get away with referring to the right as fascist, and the current ideology as fascist, even referring to the current government as soft dictatorship. They can talk about disruptive protests, and not even sit-ins, but directly interfering in ICE raids. No one is handwringing about liberals being radicalized online. No one is concerned about protecting women from toxic feminist or radical left ideologies.
This is bad from two angles. First, focus on one group makes it almost impossible to talk about the actual phenomenon and the mechanisms that drive it. Social media is perfectly designed to promote engagement and it turns out that the best way to do that is to radicalize everyone so they keep doomscrolling and hate posting. Second, the large blind spot on the left makes it extremely likely that there will be political violence coming from the left where this is allowed to go on unhindered. Bluesky is liberal twitter. But while twitter is regularly called out as dangerous radicalization, blue sky gets a pass. Liberals can get mainstream publication for a book called “On Tyranny” that pretty much calls Trump and MAGA fascist. No one would have touched a similar book about Biden. When that happens, it seems pretty likely that the group getting a pass for violent and dehumanizing speech is going to create radicals.
If my relatively unconsidered perception that women are more susceptible to peer pressure (on average) whereas men are more likely to go full on dril "it only makes my opinions Worse" in response, then this is both ironic and counterproductive, or at least an inefficient use of cultural resources.
It’s all counterproductive in the very real sense of the world, whether you double down or fall for peer pressure simply because a society full of opposing radical factions is going to quickly tear itself apart. The society full of people cheering every ICE raid and with people convinced that ICE raids are (and I’ve seen this phrase used in the wild) the boxcar phase of the holocaust is going to come to blows rather quickly.
And the problem to me isn’t which side gets radicalized, tbh especially since my exit from a lot of online political discourse, both sides are pretty darn radical at this point, and it’s going to get worse as the algorithm rewards radical content and silos people into political tribes. At the moment, because only one group of radicals is being monitored and warned against, it’s easier for the other side to push the envelope farther until we start seeing it acted out in very violent public ways.
And again, this is a problem that happens on all sides. But until you can talk about the general process and incentives in the social media space that are creating radicalization, it’s hard to stop it. The problem isn’t the teen doing a TikTok dance on hearing about the Kirk assassination. The problem is the social media creating an environment that encourages and rewards radicalization and keeps people in radicalization silos. Fixing that before we blow up Western civilization for likes is the challenge of our time. At present, we only want to talk about the issue in terms of incels and “fascism” and “the manosphere” all of which, from the liberal perspective is “those weirdos over there”. And as long as everyone is saying “it’s not us, it’s those people over there,” no one will solve the problem.
I definitely think the algo has something to do with it (perhaps even a lot to do with it) but I also think the influence of social media would be tempered by much better economic conditions. The ideological terrorism in the 1970s happened without the algorithm, but I would hazard a guess that the mediocre economy helped fan the flames more than a little.
On the gripping hand, though, the worse economic conditions would be tempered by a better algorithm (or none at all). In particular, it seems like gender relations are really poisoned now in a way that they weren't in, say, the 1970s. And I think that's insanely radicalizing, people can handle being relatively poor if there is still a viable path to marriage and family formation, and it seems to me that right now the algorithm and the socio-cultural trends it amplifies are harming that more than the economy.
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