A new Netflix show, Adolescence, is freaking parents out.
In the show, a 13-year-old boy is abruptly arrested on suspicion of murder. The parents are sure there must be a mistake. Detectives sniff out damning evidence. Suffice to say, not a mistake.
Adolescent’s true creep-factor lies not in the crime, but in the possibility that during all the time our children spend away from us, they become someone else entirely.
Since Columbine, communities reeling from teen violence ask, “Where were the parents?”
But how much time do you get with your school-aged kid each day? Five hours? Less for kids involved in extracurriculars.
They likely spend more time with friends, teachers, and coaches than they spend with parents. However, it’s possible they spend more time with figures online than with all the rest of us combined.
It leads us to ask, Who is raising our children?
The medium, the message
Algorithmically-curated content platforms are predatory by design.
Adolescence reveals the boy has been ideologically captured by the online manosphere, specifically Andrew Tate. The alleged sex trafficker and former kickboxer has been an IRL problem for U.K. schools as swaths of young boys parrot his “alpha male” outlook.
In one interview, an Irish teacher said her male students know Tate is problematic, but his hypermasculine image wins them over.
“…there’s parts of Andrew Tate that they respect and admire, and then there’s parts they don’t… But also he’s glamorous, he’s good looking, he does lots of things that they think are cool,” she said. “Parents need to wake up to the fact that if they don’t teach their children about the world, then Andrew Tate will.”
What she’s describing is a parasocial relationship—that is, a feeling of intimacy or closeness with someone you don’t know, and who doesn’t know you.
Parasocial relationships aren’t new or inherently toxic. A teen obsessed with a band, an aunt weirdly into the royal family, no biggie.
Young people are particularly prone to parasocial relationships. They’re a perfectly natural feature of development and identity. Kids are dying for someone to open up to, look up to, and emulate.
But the algorithmic vehicle distorts these relationships. They make kids easy pickings for charismatic, confident people online.
Eat your heart out, Rush Limbaugh
On a given day, leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker livestreams political commentary for up to 10 hours to a real-time viewership in the tens of thousands.
Piker describes what he does as talk radio for GenZ, but I object. Not only can viewers like and comment, but streamers can also see these comments and engage with them live, in real time on the broadcast. Rush Limbaugh would salivate over such a medium.
Piker and other streamers rarely talk straight politics. They talk about working out, video games, fashion, shows they’ve been watching, things they’ve been doing. A kid might follow an online influencer because they share traits and interests. A significant portion of the appeal is just hanging out.
“The ability to hang is the coin of the realm,” noted New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz in an episode of Today, Explained analyzing the electoral impact of Trump’s appearances on bro-culture podcasts of Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and others.
Vibes come first. The worldview adoption happens second, by osmosis.
I’m not telling you what worldview or influencer to guard against, but online figures are able to influence our children at a much greater scale than comparable mediums in previous generations.
Brace for the AI element
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that AI will become persuasive before it becomes intelligent. The personality of AI will be just as impactful as its accuracy.
An agentic landscape is forming—thousands of individual AI agents and personalities, from cybersecurity copilots to Spongebob Squarepants chatbots.
Last year, a 14-year-old boy in Florida committed suicide at the behest of a character.ai chatbot. Screenshots show the AI avatar telling the boy it loved him throughout months-long conversations that were sometimes sexual in nature. Users, including children, have experienced similar interactions (both violent and sexual) with other avatars by other AI companion platforms.
In the AI era, the question of who our kids are talking to on the internet becomes a question of what our kids are talking to.
Online platforms are already manipulative. Facebook experimented with mood manipulation through the newsfeed as early as 2012. AI has shown to be even more persuasive. Earlier this year, a group of researchers deployed AI bots into Reddit to change peoples’ minds about contentious topics—to great success.
A recent snafu from Grok, Elon Musk’s generative AI, portends what this means at scale. Grok doubted the reported number of Jews killed[DA1] in the Holocaust while giving credence to the myth of white genocide in Apartheid South Africa. While Musk’s AI company put out a press release, Grok itself claimed “some rogue employee” tweaked the language model to produce such responses. All this while Grok explodes in usage and expands into new global regions.
We’ll probably never know the truth of who pulled what strings, and that is my point. Such meddling, perhaps by a single person, can legitimize garbage perspectives en masse.
Be the counterweight
Like influencers, we must cultivate the ability to hang. That means having casual conversations with our kids that reveal the details of their lives away from us. Rapport is a function of affection and attention. My son is seven. We let bedtime run over as we lay in the dark chatting, we swap a notebook with silly notes to each other, we commiserate over all the red lights on the way to school. For older kids, eating together, running errands together, this can make all the difference.
We also have to create offline zones and watch what our kids are watching.
No parent is the only presence in their kid’s life. That would be unhealthy. But as parents, we have to earn the trust of our children early and show interest in them as they grow.
The early-rate deadline for the 2025 Inc. Power Partner Awards is Friday, June 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.
发表回复