When you do not know who you are, someone will likely be able to let you know who to be, especially when you’re young and online.
To be male and young in the trendy era is to be unaware of your potential and naive to industries that take advantage of selling you the illusion of happiness through materialism, nihilism, because feminism is an enemy combatant and submission to a supposedly influential and heroic male figure.
Asia Grace of The Post experimented with Chinese social media platform TikTok and Google YouTube, the second hottest website on the earth, by making a fake profile pretending to be a 14-year-old boy named Jayden to gauge what type of content is targeted at this demographic.
What she found “terrified” her.
In lower than a minute across each platforms, “Jayden” was flooded with video streams of women lip-syncing and twerking, which soon escalated into more violent and offensive content, akin to a web-based video through which Andrew Tate laughs on the considered stoning a Muslim woman sentenced to death death for defying her husband.
She was also subjected to more hateful content disguised as “black humor”, talking about killing orphans, hanging black people, and mocking Asian accents.
This exposure of targeted degeneracy targeting our young men directly – plus the knowledge that 93% of US men aged 13 to 25 have YouTube accounts and 62% have TikTok accounts – will make any parent of Generation Z worry. how this sick stuff can affect their children.
While we may not like what’s targeted at young men, the algorithms work partially by providing demographic content that they are already considering.
So why are they so desperate to watch shockingly offensive videos and avid consumers of flawed male influencers?
I believe a part of the reply is that such content is taken into account counterculture; these influencers do taboo things you mustn’t do and say taboo things you mustn’t say.
By going against the present, they risk becoming social pariahs – and that is attractive to young men because they have a tendency to be drawn to dangerous behavior.
Once I was younger, I knew we shouldn’t admit that we laughed uncontrollably at Beavis and Butt-Head’s crude jokes and pretended we didn’t watch every episode of MTV’s “Jackass” because we knew our parents hated those shows.
Games like Mortal Kombat were purported to make us more violent, and listening to music like Marilyn Manson was purported to turn us all into school shooters.
However the difference between what I experienced as a teen and what our young men of Generation Z are dealing with is the multitude and number of content they are capable of devour on a day by day basis – it has a much greater impact than previously.
Our young men are faced with an algorithmically countless stream of shocking content, while “Beavis and Butt-Head” got here out once every week.
To compound the issue, our young men are increasingly growing up in environments lacking an important male figure to assist guide them in an eternally confusing world: their fathers.
Based on the Pew Research Institute, the US ranks first on the earth for youngsters growing up in single-parent homes: That is the case for nearly 1 / 4 (23%) of our children.
Our young men should spend their early life learning find out how to turn into healthful, stoic and properly masculine men by someone who invests in them realizing their potential.
As an alternative, too many are lost, looking for guidance from caricatures of masculinity who act like sexual and materialistic perverts.
Our lost boys are being led astray since the family unit in America has been falling apart for years, and their childhood tutoring by the men they are purported to emulate has been recklessly made optional.
As the daddy of a Gen Z boy, I understand that I’m a barometer of masculinity for my son, and my consistent commitment to his life cannot get replaced by Andrew Tates of the world.
Through the years, I have been training him to be wary of individuals like Tate and making him aware of the industries of manipulation and confusion that social media platforms benefit from, because protecting him is my job as his father, not social media.
Social media platforms weren’t designed to care about our kid’s performance. Parents were.
Adam B. Coleman is the creator of Black Sacrifice to a Black Winner and founding father of Mistaken Speak. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.