This is really unsettling. It reminds me a little bit of parts of my own childhood. It also has me sort of conflicted. I spent a lot of time on 4chan as a teenager right when it was launched. As a...
This is really unsettling. It reminds me a little bit of parts of my own childhood. It also has me sort of conflicted.
I spent a lot of time on 4chan as a teenager right when it was launched. As a result, I spent a lot of time involved in edgy communities. I never really absorbed or took any of it to heart like the subject of this story seems to have though. I was just being an edgy teen and rebelling with an esoteric community.
On the one hand, I was probably at a pretty big risk of spiraling into something deeper. On the other hand, had my parents found out, involuntarily committed me, gotten the FBI involved, then agreed to have an entire story published about me by NPR, the entire experience would have been massively traumatic, and probably would have ruined my life for years.
As it stood, I snapped out of it into adulthood, realized that all of that content I used to consume was pretty harmful and not really that funny, and was able to put that period of time behind me with little Ill effect.
Its nearly impossible to find the right balance between heavy handed intervention and allowing your kids autonomy. I think I lean towards the intervention being appropriate in this case since there were weapons and self harm involved, but I can't help but feel for the kid. This whole thing was probably was deeply embarrassing for him, and is always going to be a blemish on his life that follows him around forever.
I think a lot has changed since the early 00s and now. We had the opportunity to explore these awful spaces at our own leisure with more off-ramps available to us. Now, algorithmically driven...
I think a lot has changed since the early 00s and now. We had the opportunity to explore these awful spaces at our own leisure with more off-ramps available to us. Now, algorithmically driven consumption mainlines this shit into everyone's brains and the line between online/offline lives is basically non-existent.
At it's core, this is a cultural values issue but until we can as a society can figure out what the fuck we're doing, these interventions make sense in the light of the fact this child was already in therapy for depression/self harm, withdrawing while expressing hateful and suicidal thoughts, and buying a knife with "death' inscribed on it. To me, this is more than just an edgy teen and to hear medical staff state he's a moderate/high risk of suicide, being involuntary committed ( I'd argue this characterization wouldn't apply for a 14 yo) makes sense. Sure there there's embarrassment and the possibility this will follow him around but the alternative seems far worse and if he continues to get help, I can see this as an important moment in his life that informs his world view versus a burden or blemish.
Yeah this kid is gonna have a swastika scar on his body for the rest of his life I think the FBI getting involved is on the low end of his trauma. Like for sure this kid is gonna be on some rando...
Yeah this kid is gonna have a swastika scar on his body for the rest of his life I think the FBI getting involved is on the low end of his trauma.
Like for sure this kid is gonna be on some rando website years from now and come across a picture of himself, naked, cut up and bloody like, friggin, Spike from the last season of Buffy.
He made himself into entertainment for others. NPR getting ahold of him was just the last story piece among a long line of them. Thats going to take a lifetime.
Mild correction suggestion, bad people generated content for entertainment by manipulating him into doing this using his child body. I think children should get a bit more leeway about their...
Mild correction suggestion, bad people generated content for entertainment by manipulating him into doing this using his child body. I think children should get a bit more leeway about their involvement.
Hopefully he gets healthy enough one day to say, that was a thing that happened to me, and I survived, instead of that was a thing that I did.
If a child was manipulated into marrying an abuser quite young, for example, we'd say that was something that happened to them instead of spending they did to themselves. So hopefully the narrative him and his therapist come up with can be a kind one as well.
That might be the core problem. 4chan is a lot of things, but it's not driven by any algorithm you can pay ad revenue to influence. You're simply getting the "internet" straight out the nozzle....
n leisure with more off-ramps available to us. Now, algorithmically driven consumption mainlines this shit into everyone's brains and the line between online/offline lives is basically non-existent.
That might be the core problem. 4chan is a lot of things, but it's not driven by any algorithm you can pay ad revenue to influence. You're simply getting the "internet" straight out the nozzle. For better or worse.
That's very much not the case these days. And it likely doesn't help thst all of that "engagement" is available in your pocket now. Communities can be as sticky as a cult now, as opposed to a bunch of bumbling teens shouting profanities on an image board
At risk of repeating myself, because I've told this story before on Tildes; I went through something similar. I was a bullied kid and teenager for a good portion of my time in school, and it...
At risk of repeating myself, because I've told this story before on Tildes; I went through something similar. I was a bullied kid and teenager for a good portion of my time in school, and it resulted in me finding online friends and turning video games into my main hobby. Years of my teenage life consisted of coming home from school, responding to my mom asking "How was school?" with "Good." and vanishing into my room to play video games.
When Gamergate got big from 2014 onwards, I got into it through reddit, and spent a lot of time keeping up to date and having opinion on a culture war developing on a different continent. In retrospect, a huge waste of time. In retrospect, I also realised how easy it is to develop opinions on things that fit "the group's" opinion because they are "your people". I still have the same reddit account, and if you go back far enough, you'll find my comment somewhere arguing that "The USA does not have a gun problem, but a mental health problem." aka the classic NRA dogwhistle trying to avoid blaming guns for America's gun problem. I don't even live on the American continent by the way.
Incidentally, getting out of that environment is both simpler than you think and more difficult. To me it was a combination of factors: The intense bullying phase of my school career ultimately lasted for only like 4 years, and the last 4 years of school in mostly a different class were fine. Not great, I didn't make friends, but I was left alone at least. In the last years of school I also got my first girlfriend, got outside, touched grass, that sort of thing. It made me realise how profoundly unimportant all that nonsense was, and how much of it I just believed because I was fed lies and I just wanted to belong. At the same time I was exiting Gamergate, which had rapidly turned into an alt-right radicalization pipeline, it also turned up the heat when Trump joined the playing field in 2016. The most radical break was when I left school and got into uni in a different town, which finally allowed me to make actual friends that don't live in other countries. By then I had abandoned keeping up with drama reddit threads for years because I just didn't have time.
Notably, at no point in this pipeline was I actually ever challenged about my beliefs in a direct fashion, which afaik is not a thing you're supposed to do anyhow when deprogramming folks. It's not that people were actively avoiding challenging me, I think a lot of this stuff was just contained in my internet persona and rarely bled through into real life. I basically challenged myself years down the line in university when I realised more and more how completely fucked everything had been and that the only reason I was ever in there and said and believed those things because I was desperately trying to belong, which is a common thing in radical groups.
Yeah, I can identify with that deeply, because I went through a similar thing as well. Oddly enough I wasn't really bullied in school. I just felt like I didn't fit in. I had friends, but I always...
Yeah, I can identify with that deeply, because I went through a similar thing as well. Oddly enough I wasn't really bullied in school. I just felt like I didn't fit in. I had friends, but I always felt awkward around people and felt like people never really understood the "real me", which I identified as the person I was online. I went through a psuedo libertarian phase, edgy humor, so on and so forth. I too just sort of has the realization over time that the internet wasn't real life; the "friends" I had online weren't really my friends, and nothing I posted on reddit or 4chan ever mattered. Even to this day, writing comments like this are a way to pass the time, but don't actually matter to me much.
I think it's a way healthier way to live your life. I only wonder how I could instill that idea into my children so they don't have to go through the same thing.
Interesting! For me it's the opposite, those internet friends are what got me through dark times. I'm fairly certain I would not be here if I didn't have them back then and we've even met up IRL a...
Interesting! For me it's the opposite, those internet friends are what got me through dark times. I'm fairly certain I would not be here if I didn't have them back then and we've even met up IRL a couple times now. I crossed an ocean to attend a wedding, for example.
Overall I do agree it's healthier to live your life with a healthy present in your real, actual life.
I think I put internet friends I've met up with in an entirely different category. I have friends from the internet that I visit every so often, but I don't consider them internet friends, they're...
I think I put internet friends I've met up with in an entirely different category. I have friends from the internet that I visit every so often, but I don't consider them internet friends, they're just my friends.
There are probably hundreds of people that I've been friendly with over the internet over the years but never met up with, and I never think about any of them anymore.
4chan (and a few others in that same realm) in the mid 00's for me was a bit enthralling at the time because I was seeing stuff there I couldn't really see anywhere else. Prior to this, the only...
4chan (and a few others in that same realm) in the mid 00's for me was a bit enthralling at the time because I was seeing stuff there I couldn't really see anywhere else. Prior to this, the only communities I visited online were forums, much more curated and community driven but the discussion topics were very focused and slow. This was a no rules forum that moved lightning fast, refresh and you have already missed tons of posts/replies. They had some of the earliest memes and did a lot of "raids" or other various events on both the internet and real life. It had some really great organic online moments I connected with like the Scientology and the Westboro Baptist Church protests, you know dumb stuff like trying to send them all black faxes to waste their ink. Then the rest of the internet started to catch up on ways to do stuff online, and I outgrew that phase of my life.
I mostly dismissed a lot of the hateful lexicon as just something people typed at each other and more a tongue in cheek kind of hazing. Maybe I am/was too naive, but the majority of the users didn't really seem to believe that hate, they just used slurs because they could there. Of course you can't mention 4chan without acknowledging some of the worst people the internet had to offer did post some absolute heinous shit, but the admins typically would step in for those.
I can see why if you don't approach those kind of places with the mindset of everyone on this platform is just a performance artist looking for reactions, then it can get dark really fast.
I think that kids these days have more reasons to believe the world has become totally awful, though. Back in my day, I can turn off the shock site, go ride a bike with my friend, and eat pizza...
I think that kids these days have more reasons to believe the world has become totally awful, though. Back in my day, I can turn off the shock site, go ride a bike with my friend, and eat pizza that mom and dad bring back to our too large suburban house using their stable income. The contrast between the online doom and the sunlight outside with green touchable grass probably kept a lot of us sane.
These days, a lot of those 90s-00s social safety nets have further eroded, and social media has become much more of a core part of life. Hits probably different
I'm glad to see an article about this problem. When I moderated online mental health communities these kind of people were really, really nasty. Some would basically create an online 'cult' of...
I'm glad to see an article about this problem. When I moderated online mental health communities these kind of people were really, really nasty. Some would basically create an online 'cult' of them, much like the experience written in this article. Tempting to talk about the details, but I think the article itself is already heavy enough.
It's not often people even want to talk about this for the obvious reasons. But we're going to need to talk about mental health in general more on schools at least. As well as how to deal with. These people.
I'm pretty sure my psyche is still fucked from a short stint on 4chan during high school 15 years ago. I hope this kid can get over this someday, and that his story can help prepare other parents...
I'm pretty sure my psyche is still fucked from a short stint on 4chan during high school 15 years ago. I hope this kid can get over this someday, and that his story can help prepare other parents for the realities of the internet - it's a very dangerous place.
And even if my kid turns out okay, I'm quite worried that the world they're going into are now filled with kids who aren't okay. But it's not that bleak though, I'm sure enough of them will manage...
And even if my kid turns out okay, I'm quite worried that the world they're going into are now filled with kids who aren't okay.
But it's not that bleak though, I'm sure enough of them will manage to grow up okay and be in healthy environments where things like this somehow didn't touch them. At least there isn't a world war with conscription to make sure every young man is exposed to hands on violence/gore, and at least we don't marry our daughters off while they are preteens. We've survived worse and we'll pull though
Hoo boy, this one is a toughy, especially as a person who is very into Metal and Black Metal specifically, while also having children. Although, maybe it'll be luck that *"My Dad listens to Black...
Hoo boy, this one is a toughy, especially as a person who is very into Metal and Black Metal specifically, while also having children. Although, maybe it'll be luck that *"My Dad listens to Black Metal, it's so uncool.".
At any rate, I spent some time in some of these online spaces when I was younger too, thinking mid-teenager to early 20 something, frequenting forums at sites like metal-torrents.com and metal-archives.com, but during those times it never really seemed terribly toxic, as described in this article. I'm well familiar with the term "cvlt", though in those spaces, at that time (late 90's, early 00's) it was very tongue-in-cheek.
That said, everyone in the community knows there's always been an undercurrent of Nazism within Black Metal, such as widely mocked Varg Vikernes, but there are certainly plenty of people who ascribe to that point of view and take it even deeper; many bands even creating stuff under the genre label NSBM or National Socialist Black Metal (Nazi shit). It sucks that this kid got caught-up in that, though I do wonder at the true proportion of people that come out of the space like that. But again, it's been 20-years since I was frequently involved in those kinds of spaces, so I don't know how it's changed, even though I'm still very much into the genre (that is, Black Metal, not NSBM),
But it gives me food for thought about how I have to teach my kids to navigate such spaces and what I'll do when it comes time. They're currently only 7 and 5, so I have different worries right now, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't allow electronics in their room (though I had them) so they're not sucked into holes like this. Though my hope is, since I'm a big gamer, that'll be their thing as teenagers and they'll avoid these spaces altogether, but who knows. It's so easy to fall down rabbit holes these days and I especially worry about it with young boys.
Also worth noting that there's been pushback within the Metal community on stuff like NSBM. Plenty of open-minded metal heads out there, of which you can find them over at (RABM)[https://www.reddit.com/r/rabm/] on reddit.
I don’t think its a good idea to try and restrict content to a teenager. They obviously find ways around it. A better place to start would be making sure they get exposed to the right channels...
I don’t think its a good idea to try and restrict content to a teenager. They obviously find ways around it.
A better place to start would be making sure they get exposed to the right channels first, channels that talk about teenage problems in the context of these cults existing and how to handle life without joining a place that tells you that you belong so they can exploit you.
Ive had friends go down this rabbit hole as adults. The sense of belonging these cults provide is addictive, even to adults. We all could probably just make sure our kids feel like they belong somewhere and avoid this situation entirely.
ugh, I've been there, needing extended stays and being told there's nothing take them home. And do what, be in danger. Much more resources are needed. For example how on earth are they managing to...
The FBI told Dana that Elliott needed inpatient care for 30 to 60 days, primarily to "detox" from the harmful networks in which he had immersed himself for many months. But Dana said no care facility was familiar with the harms he had experienced or was able to accommodate a prolonged stay. In the end, she says, he spent less than two weeks in inpatient care. After that, he was partially hospitalized, sleeping at home but receiving seven hours of therapy each day.
ugh, I've been there, needing extended stays and being told there's nothing take them home. And do what, be in danger. Much more resources are needed. For example how on earth are they managing to pay for 7hrs of therapy a day?
Question: are YouTube videos part of this pipeline? What if they're not using chat just passively watching whatever the algorithm gives them? I know some very little kids (4-12) who watch YouTube all day every day.
My kid just so happens to read books all day every day, but I'm not immune because I can't keep up what they're reading at all anymore. If videos were their choice of poison I would be in exactly the same camp.
This is really unsettling. It reminds me a little bit of parts of my own childhood. It also has me sort of conflicted.
I spent a lot of time on 4chan as a teenager right when it was launched. As a result, I spent a lot of time involved in edgy communities. I never really absorbed or took any of it to heart like the subject of this story seems to have though. I was just being an edgy teen and rebelling with an esoteric community.
On the one hand, I was probably at a pretty big risk of spiraling into something deeper. On the other hand, had my parents found out, involuntarily committed me, gotten the FBI involved, then agreed to have an entire story published about me by NPR, the entire experience would have been massively traumatic, and probably would have ruined my life for years.
As it stood, I snapped out of it into adulthood, realized that all of that content I used to consume was pretty harmful and not really that funny, and was able to put that period of time behind me with little Ill effect.
Its nearly impossible to find the right balance between heavy handed intervention and allowing your kids autonomy. I think I lean towards the intervention being appropriate in this case since there were weapons and self harm involved, but I can't help but feel for the kid. This whole thing was probably was deeply embarrassing for him, and is always going to be a blemish on his life that follows him around forever.
I think a lot has changed since the early 00s and now. We had the opportunity to explore these awful spaces at our own leisure with more off-ramps available to us. Now, algorithmically driven consumption mainlines this shit into everyone's brains and the line between online/offline lives is basically non-existent.
At it's core, this is a cultural values issue but until we can as a society can figure out what the fuck we're doing, these interventions make sense in the light of the fact this child was already in therapy for depression/self harm, withdrawing while expressing hateful and suicidal thoughts, and buying a knife with "death' inscribed on it. To me, this is more than just an edgy teen and to hear medical staff state he's a moderate/high risk of suicide, being involuntary committed ( I'd argue this characterization wouldn't apply for a 14 yo) makes sense. Sure there there's embarrassment and the possibility this will follow him around but the alternative seems far worse and if he continues to get help, I can see this as an important moment in his life that informs his world view versus a burden or blemish.
Yeah this kid is gonna have a swastika scar on his body for the rest of his life I think the FBI getting involved is on the low end of his trauma.
Like for sure this kid is gonna be on some rando website years from now and come across a picture of himself, naked, cut up and bloody like, friggin, Spike from the last season of Buffy.
He made himself into entertainment for others. NPR getting ahold of him was just the last story piece among a long line of them. Thats going to take a lifetime.
Mild correction suggestion, bad people generated content for entertainment by manipulating him into doing this using his child body. I think children should get a bit more leeway about their involvement.
Hopefully he gets healthy enough one day to say, that was a thing that happened to me, and I survived, instead of that was a thing that I did.
If a child was manipulated into marrying an abuser quite young, for example, we'd say that was something that happened to them instead of spending they did to themselves. So hopefully the narrative him and his therapist come up with can be a kind one as well.
That might be the core problem. 4chan is a lot of things, but it's not driven by any algorithm you can pay ad revenue to influence. You're simply getting the "internet" straight out the nozzle. For better or worse.
That's very much not the case these days. And it likely doesn't help thst all of that "engagement" is available in your pocket now. Communities can be as sticky as a cult now, as opposed to a bunch of bumbling teens shouting profanities on an image board
At risk of repeating myself, because I've told this story before on Tildes; I went through something similar. I was a bullied kid and teenager for a good portion of my time in school, and it resulted in me finding online friends and turning video games into my main hobby. Years of my teenage life consisted of coming home from school, responding to my mom asking "How was school?" with "Good." and vanishing into my room to play video games.
When Gamergate got big from 2014 onwards, I got into it through reddit, and spent a lot of time keeping up to date and having opinion on a culture war developing on a different continent. In retrospect, a huge waste of time. In retrospect, I also realised how easy it is to develop opinions on things that fit "the group's" opinion because they are "your people". I still have the same reddit account, and if you go back far enough, you'll find my comment somewhere arguing that "The USA does not have a gun problem, but a mental health problem." aka the classic NRA dogwhistle trying to avoid blaming guns for America's gun problem. I don't even live on the American continent by the way.
Incidentally, getting out of that environment is both simpler than you think and more difficult. To me it was a combination of factors: The intense bullying phase of my school career ultimately lasted for only like 4 years, and the last 4 years of school in mostly a different class were fine. Not great, I didn't make friends, but I was left alone at least. In the last years of school I also got my first girlfriend, got outside, touched grass, that sort of thing. It made me realise how profoundly unimportant all that nonsense was, and how much of it I just believed because I was fed lies and I just wanted to belong. At the same time I was exiting Gamergate, which had rapidly turned into an alt-right radicalization pipeline, it also turned up the heat when Trump joined the playing field in 2016. The most radical break was when I left school and got into uni in a different town, which finally allowed me to make actual friends that don't live in other countries. By then I had abandoned keeping up with drama reddit threads for years because I just didn't have time.
Notably, at no point in this pipeline was I actually ever challenged about my beliefs in a direct fashion, which afaik is not a thing you're supposed to do anyhow when deprogramming folks. It's not that people were actively avoiding challenging me, I think a lot of this stuff was just contained in my internet persona and rarely bled through into real life. I basically challenged myself years down the line in university when I realised more and more how completely fucked everything had been and that the only reason I was ever in there and said and believed those things because I was desperately trying to belong, which is a common thing in radical groups.
Yeah, I can identify with that deeply, because I went through a similar thing as well. Oddly enough I wasn't really bullied in school. I just felt like I didn't fit in. I had friends, but I always felt awkward around people and felt like people never really understood the "real me", which I identified as the person I was online. I went through a psuedo libertarian phase, edgy humor, so on and so forth. I too just sort of has the realization over time that the internet wasn't real life; the "friends" I had online weren't really my friends, and nothing I posted on reddit or 4chan ever mattered. Even to this day, writing comments like this are a way to pass the time, but don't actually matter to me much.
I think it's a way healthier way to live your life. I only wonder how I could instill that idea into my children so they don't have to go through the same thing.
Interesting! For me it's the opposite, those internet friends are what got me through dark times. I'm fairly certain I would not be here if I didn't have them back then and we've even met up IRL a couple times now. I crossed an ocean to attend a wedding, for example.
Overall I do agree it's healthier to live your life with a healthy present in your real, actual life.
I think I put internet friends I've met up with in an entirely different category. I have friends from the internet that I visit every so often, but I don't consider them internet friends, they're just my friends.
There are probably hundreds of people that I've been friendly with over the internet over the years but never met up with, and I never think about any of them anymore.
4chan (and a few others in that same realm) in the mid 00's for me was a bit enthralling at the time because I was seeing stuff there I couldn't really see anywhere else. Prior to this, the only communities I visited online were forums, much more curated and community driven but the discussion topics were very focused and slow. This was a no rules forum that moved lightning fast, refresh and you have already missed tons of posts/replies. They had some of the earliest memes and did a lot of "raids" or other various events on both the internet and real life. It had some really great organic online moments I connected with like the Scientology and the Westboro Baptist Church protests, you know dumb stuff like trying to send them all black faxes to waste their ink. Then the rest of the internet started to catch up on ways to do stuff online, and I outgrew that phase of my life.
I mostly dismissed a lot of the hateful lexicon as just something people typed at each other and more a tongue in cheek kind of hazing. Maybe I am/was too naive, but the majority of the users didn't really seem to believe that hate, they just used slurs because they could there. Of course you can't mention 4chan without acknowledging some of the worst people the internet had to offer did post some absolute heinous shit, but the admins typically would step in for those.
I can see why if you don't approach those kind of places with the mindset of everyone on this platform is just a performance artist looking for reactions, then it can get dark really fast.
I think that kids these days have more reasons to believe the world has become totally awful, though. Back in my day, I can turn off the shock site, go ride a bike with my friend, and eat pizza that mom and dad bring back to our too large suburban house using their stable income. The contrast between the online doom and the sunlight outside with green touchable grass probably kept a lot of us sane.
These days, a lot of those 90s-00s social safety nets have further eroded, and social media has become much more of a core part of life. Hits probably different
I'm so sorry.
I'm glad to see an article about this problem. When I moderated online mental health communities these kind of people were really, really nasty. Some would basically create an online 'cult' of them, much like the experience written in this article. Tempting to talk about the details, but I think the article itself is already heavy enough.
It's not often people even want to talk about this for the obvious reasons. But we're going to need to talk about mental health in general more on schools at least. As well as how to deal with. These people.
Really brings back some nasty memories tbh.
I'm pretty sure my psyche is still fucked from a short stint on 4chan during high school 15 years ago. I hope this kid can get over this someday, and that his story can help prepare other parents for the realities of the internet - it's a very dangerous place.
My friends and I used to use 4chan mostly for laughing at the users there. Even then we'd lurk on /g/ which is hardly the worst board.
I do not envy anyone trying to raise children these days, having to balance not being overbearing with this deeply fucked up world we live in.
And even if my kid turns out okay, I'm quite worried that the world they're going into are now filled with kids who aren't okay.
But it's not that bleak though, I'm sure enough of them will manage to grow up okay and be in healthy environments where things like this somehow didn't touch them. At least there isn't a world war with conscription to make sure every young man is exposed to hands on violence/gore, and at least we don't marry our daughters off while they are preteens. We've survived worse and we'll pull though
Hoo boy, this one is a toughy, especially as a person who is very into Metal and Black Metal specifically, while also having children. Although, maybe it'll be luck that *"My Dad listens to Black Metal, it's so uncool.".
At any rate, I spent some time in some of these online spaces when I was younger too, thinking mid-teenager to early 20 something, frequenting forums at sites like metal-torrents.com and metal-archives.com, but during those times it never really seemed terribly toxic, as described in this article. I'm well familiar with the term "cvlt", though in those spaces, at that time (late 90's, early 00's) it was very tongue-in-cheek.
That said, everyone in the community knows there's always been an undercurrent of Nazism within Black Metal, such as widely mocked Varg Vikernes, but there are certainly plenty of people who ascribe to that point of view and take it even deeper; many bands even creating stuff under the genre label NSBM or National Socialist Black Metal (Nazi shit). It sucks that this kid got caught-up in that, though I do wonder at the true proportion of people that come out of the space like that. But again, it's been 20-years since I was frequently involved in those kinds of spaces, so I don't know how it's changed, even though I'm still very much into the genre (that is, Black Metal, not NSBM),
But it gives me food for thought about how I have to teach my kids to navigate such spaces and what I'll do when it comes time. They're currently only 7 and 5, so I have different worries right now, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't allow electronics in their room (though I had them) so they're not sucked into holes like this. Though my hope is, since I'm a big gamer, that'll be their thing as teenagers and they'll avoid these spaces altogether, but who knows. It's so easy to fall down rabbit holes these days and I especially worry about it with young boys.
Also worth noting that there's been pushback within the Metal community on stuff like NSBM. Plenty of open-minded metal heads out there, of which you can find them over at (RABM)[https://www.reddit.com/r/rabm/] on reddit.
I don’t think its a good idea to try and restrict content to a teenager. They obviously find ways around it.
A better place to start would be making sure they get exposed to the right channels first, channels that talk about teenage problems in the context of these cults existing and how to handle life without joining a place that tells you that you belong so they can exploit you.
Ive had friends go down this rabbit hole as adults. The sense of belonging these cults provide is addictive, even to adults. We all could probably just make sure our kids feel like they belong somewhere and avoid this situation entirely.
ugh, I've been there, needing extended stays and being told there's nothing take them home. And do what, be in danger. Much more resources are needed. For example how on earth are they managing to pay for 7hrs of therapy a day?
Question: are YouTube videos part of this pipeline? What if they're not using chat just passively watching whatever the algorithm gives them? I know some very little kids (4-12) who watch YouTube all day every day.
My kid just so happens to read books all day every day, but I'm not immune because I can't keep up what they're reading at all anymore. If videos were their choice of poison I would be in exactly the same camp.
typo