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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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