This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.

  • Sixty
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    07 months ago

    Wonder if it has anything to do with oligarchs taking over the internet so only a select few sites run by them are popular. It can’t be just like television was to the boomers, no way.

  • FreshLight
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    17 months ago

    It’s never about gender… Turns out there are good and shitty people regardless of gender, race, religion or whatever else there might be…

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    I’m a Gen Z male, from what I can tell it seems like older generations tend to rely more on cable or traditional news outlets while younger generations tend to get their news from social media platforms like Instagram. Cable news tends to be more corporate and “normal”/consistent, while Instagram tends to feed news from a larger variety of sources that tend to be more anti-corporate and radical, but those sources also tend to optimize for very short bursts to get the point across quickly so the user can quickly move on to the next piece of news, and there’s also quite a bit of low effort content and reposts and misinformation and that sort of stuff. So I think it’s social media that’s the main driving factor in causing Gen Z to be more radical - which in some ways is a good thing since they have more awareness of the events in Palestine (and radical leftism is based), but the platform can also put them into far-right fear-mongering bubbles and cause serious problems.

    • @[email protected]
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      87 months ago

      Hey I was raised exclusively by the YouTube algorithm, and I came away from it with a deep appreciation for animation, an incredibly stupid sense of humor, and a sexuality on the spectrum of “Yes, please.” It can’t be the only reason!

  • 🖖USS-Ethernet
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    7 months ago

    I blame social media and algorithms. My teen son for the longest time was leaning further and further right due to the content he was getting served on YouTube. He was making disparaging comments about women and how stupid they are. My wife and I who lean left had to sit down and have a talk with him about what he was saying and videos that he was getting served by YouTube (that popular red pill girl, I can’t remember her name and andrew tate among other red pill stuff). He’s a pretty smart kid, once we showed him data and articles that directly proved all the things he was watching wrong, he started to come around. He’s been careful to believe things that he sees or hears on the internet more now. Occasionally, he’ll bring things to us that we have to double take and fact check to see if it’s wrong.

  • @[email protected]
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    87 months ago

    It’s counterculture. Young people, particularly young males, have always been obsessed with counterculture movements. Now why they View progressivism as the culture they need to counter I’m not sure, but they do.

  • @[email protected]
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    447 months ago

    I am Gen Z male and please do not let my blond hair, blue eyes, and German lineage deceive you. I’m as appalled as one can be with all of this. I never connected with my boomer dad or my millennial elder brothers over machismo or sports nor did I ever pick up TikTok and my social media consumption elsewhere was limited or gated by my own doing. From my experience, the pressure to conform to masculinity and male dominated in-groups; the perceived onus to keep males in power and powerful; and the propagandists’ weaponization of media such as TikTok, Facebook, podcasts, and Fox News and their ilk on TV and radio are the main depreciators of character in these cases.

      • @[email protected]
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        187 months ago

        I only mentioned those characteristics because of the Hitler Youth descriptor used in the screenshot and I wanted to underscore that there are strangers who don’t want to be seen as the enemy but the enemy has co-opted their innate look. I know not to judge a person’s character by their appearance and I hope those on this side of the situation all know that as well.

      • snooggums
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        7 months ago

        They could dye their hair…

        Clearly my attempt to joke fell flat, sorry for using comedy as a response to stress.

  • Flying Squid
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    67 months ago

    My mind skipped over the word ‘the’ in the tweet. And yet it makes sense either way.

  • @[email protected]
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    817 months ago

    As a zoomer that’s old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.

    The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.

    And our education system doesn’t do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.

    After all saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as “edgy” or something. But then when someone points out that person’s shit, suddenly that’s an attack???

    • Realitätsverlust
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      177 months ago

      “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.

      Because those were jokes.

      The problem we have today is not that it was socially acceptable to be a psychopath online in 2014. The problems are, in my opinion:

      • Rapidly decreasing standards of living
      • Social media making people more stupid
      • Governments being too large and intransparent
      • Pointless governmental spending without explaining the why to the population

      The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.

      • @[email protected]
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        87 months ago

        The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.

        Yes! Thank you.

        Just as the next left-wing shift won’t be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won’t lead to any improvement either.

        It’s a pendulum.

        People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.

        And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.

        Tribalism leads to degeneracy.

    • @[email protected]
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      17 months ago

      I have seen teachers say that hitler was right, that walls were invented by aliens and that giants existed and were romanian

      • @[email protected]
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        37 months ago

        giants existed and were romanian

        Wait, what? I didn’t see any giants in my high school. Are they invisible giants or something?

        Also, where were those giants during the 2nd Dacian war? Romans must have been superheroes or something to take on giants and win.

    • @[email protected]
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      67 months ago

      I begged my admin to do something about my boy students sexually harassing my girl students. Instead, my some of my boy students discovered I was trans and outed me.

    • @[email protected]
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      107 months ago

      The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.

      Most edgy teens do grow out of it. I roll my eyes at embarrassment at some of the stuff I wrote in college, and high school me was even stupider.

      But one difference in my high school years (in the 90’s), edginess wasn’t inherently politically coded. Some of it was racist, sexist, or homophobic, but plenty of the targets were also Republican constituencies: rural/small town people, Christians, fat people, old people, prudes, etc. In a conservative suburban area, jokes about abortion, sex, drugs, etc. were often designed to elicit shock and disgust.

      I think we’ve seen a cultural shift in which edginess is seen as right wing in itself, in part because the right, which used to get offended at things like Harry Potter and Howard Stern and Disney movies, has fallen in line with edgy Gen X comedians who somehow didn’t grow out of it, and made room for people who smoke weed and mock the Bible.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        in the 90s you attacked whatever was around cause you were a piece of shit, now you got the internet so pieces of shit worldwide can band together and hate a specific cause.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          We had the internet in the 90s. It just wasn’t in every 12-year-old’s pocket all day, and the nefarious smoky room types were too old to understand how it worked, let alone carry our mass manipulation campaigns with it as the medium.

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          band together and hate a specific cause.

          The thing with Gen X teenage nihilism was that the only cardinal sin was actually having a strong opinion. There wasn’t much room to hate on anything, because actually hating something showed that you cared too much, and that wasn’t what we were about.

          Gen Z seems to be much more willing to embrace negative emotions and acknowledge that they care enough to hate. Whether that’s a better or a worse thing, I’m not sure.

    • @[email protected]
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      197 months ago

      I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that’s basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I’m pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn’t give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that’s not exactly helpful either.

      • @[email protected]
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        37 months ago

        A lot of this are encouraged under the table. Any plans on it is usually talked rather than texed, so there will be less chance of it that it could surface, and is between the most trustworthy people.

  • @[email protected]
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    237 months ago

    the Democrats will just pander to this by getting an endorsement in 2028 from Andrew Tate.