--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, explained the year's ending, and we thought we'd bring you some of the episodes that really helped us as a team understand the world around us. And sadly, that's a world where we occasionally have to contend with mass shootings. Worse still, mass shootings perpetrated by teenagers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2022, we saw an 18-year-old murder Black people at a grocery store, and another 18-year-old murder children at an elementary school. The internet is treacherous enough for adults, but the teens. We wanted to figure out how parents can stop their kids from getting radicalized online. And we found a mom who tried.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the first time I heard like an eight-year-old scream the N-word, it was like, okay, here's the conversation we need to have. How to have a little more faith your kids aren't being radicalized online, coming up on the program.
--:-- [Ad for ServiceNow]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- [Ad for strawberry.me]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying. But are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from I don't have any kids, but I know a lot of you do. And when I'm around my friends or family members who have kids with smartphones, I always ask, so like, what boundaries are you setting there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes I'm really impressed by the answer. Sometimes I'm petrified because some parents I've spoken to aren't doing much at all. They're placing a whole lot of faith in their kids to do the right thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I didn't think much about kids like mine falling into any kind of dangerous ideology because I knew how I had raised my children. This is Joanna Schroeder. She's not a friend of mine or a family member, but she is a mom of three kids who's thought a lot more about this than most parents.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: We had very consciously brought them up to believe in equality and justice. And what I didn't factor into that was the effect of social media. And as I grew to understand how the algorithms work, I got more and more concerned about what my kids might see online.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: I think if you're consuming any type of media with your children and you're not taking the opportunity to talk about anything from a critical lens, you're missing out.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Joanna is also a writer. She focuses on gender and parenting issues. When they got older and started using social media or playing more advanced games and being able to Google and watch YouTube videos, I knew that with what their exposure would be like.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: I am a woman writing online about controversial topics, and I've seen everything you can see and heard everything you can hear. And so we did have sort of preemptive conversations.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: But what I didn't expect was the sneaky ways in which memes and jokes, quote unquote jokes, can sneak in to our consciousness and affect our ideology. That's what I didn't really expect.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And this concern became really amplified when I looked over the shoulder of one of my kids, who was probably around 13 or 14 at the time, as he scrolled his Instagram explore page. And I saw a meme fly by that had Hitler.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And he was basically liking or hearting everything that passed. And I had him slow down. I was like, what is that?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And it was a very traditional kind of meme format, meaning that they use the same image and the same typeface with different messages on it of Hitler sitting in kind of an amphitheater with people on many sides.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And normally that image is used to kind of create a fantasy where somebody could kill Hitler and have ended the war and saved so many millions of lives. In this case, when I read the content on the meme, it was somebody tipping off Hitler so that he could have won.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: He saw this meme. He didn't read it. He liked it. You read it. You didn't like it. What did you do next?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and when I say he liked it, I just mean he clicked the heart. He didn't register any sort of feelings about it. He just liked it with his hand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, just he couldn't have read it because it flew by so fast. I mean, if you watch the way a 13-year-old scrolls their For You page or their explore page, it's like scroll, click, scroll, click, scroll, click.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they like all of them. They like everything. It's a very strange phenomenon. And so when I stopped him, I was like, what do you think this says?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I said, okay, let's read this. I want you to know what's happening. So this guy back here is saying, hey, they're going to do this attack at this time against the Nazis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so that means that whoever created this thinks it's funny to imply that it would have been good or what would have happened had Hitler not been defeated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he was aghast. He had no idea. Even if once he read it, it was just a little too subtle for someone their age to really understand what was happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Especially since they'd seen that meme format using that historical photo before, it was easy to assume it would have the same sort of message or ethics behind it.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Then I said can I look through your explore page. And we just looked through it together.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And I think the first thing that was jarring to me was probably actually the sort of anti-content in it. And the fact that I knew that he didn't recognize these, what we would say are dog whistles.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: They're anti-feminist or just overall anti-woman dog whistles. And at that point, I didn't see any sort of racist content. And remember, this isn't what my child shared.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And it wasn't what my child had liked or hearted. It was just what Instagram wanted him to see next.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Did you clock the accounts that were serving up this kind of stuff? What were the accounts?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: They're all just meme accounts. It's not like it was Stormfront or something. Welcome to Stormfront on this Monday.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Very easily identifiable as some kind of Nazi thing. It's just meme accounts that are supposed to be funny.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And I want to make clear that I think this is probably in every teenage boy's explore page on Instagram, especially if he plays video games, because their interest in video games is probably one of the key identifiers that gets them targeted for this content.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Why do you think that is?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: I think because the people who are quote unquote recruiting or trying to influence our kids know that the people that are searching Minecraft, Roblox, that those are teenagers.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And that those are teenagers who may be more easy to influence because they're doing things online by themselves. And their parents think they're watching the very innocuous and delightful Dan TDM on YouTube.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: I've been playing video games ever since I was young and gaming is a huge part of my life, who I am as a person and my career.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And I want to try sharing that passion with my son. And their parents don't realize that somebody out there knows they're not being supervised.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: The woke leftist activists who talk about defunding the police out of one side of their mouths while demanding that they disarm the public on the other side. And knows that maybe they don't do 100 extracurriculars at school.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Modern society treats men like trash. I posted a meme the other day, and in that meme it was a Titanic. And when the Titanic sank, who did they take?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Did they take everyone equally? Did they take the youngest? No. It was women and children, and men stayed behind to die.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Yeah, it's so great being a man, isn't it? This isn't even taking into account the fact that every child was online 24-7 during lockdown.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: This happened before lockdown. I think it's only been amplified since then, but I think they know, hey, this is a population that is very vulnerable and easy to influence.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Replacement migration is real. It's happening in front of your face. They don't do this because they love and care for old white people or our birth rates.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: They do it because they hate us and want us replaced. So in that moment where you discover this sort of creeping, insidious nature of, say, deeply racist and white supremacist memes or even misogynistic ones that were popping up randomly in your son's feed,
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And he was sort of unwittingly liking them. Did you sort of have a policy overhaul in your household about what your kids could do, or how did you approach it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We did not, and some people might think that's wrong.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The first thing I did was say, boys, come here, we need to talk about this, and they thought they were in trouble.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I said, you're not in trouble at all, but this is something you need to know. And I went through and I said, so listen, if you don't fully understand it, don't heart it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don't like it. Read it. If you don't get it, ask me. Because this is racist. And this is pro-Nazi stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if someone sees that you like this, they're going to think that you like Nazis. And it's like their eyes just got big.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I explained the algorithm to them. I mean, even if you just stay on one meme for a really long time, or if you share it privately, Instagram says, this is what this guy likes and sends you more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So for them, it was a real education. And I said, also, anybody that follows you can see what you've liked because it tells them when it comes up in their explore page.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's just not a mistake that you want to have happen. And they heard that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And basically, my feeling was if I said, all right, Instagram's out. First of all, I don't know that they're really going to not look at Instagram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know a lot of kids who were not allowed to have Instagram and had it in some kind of hidden folder that their moms didn't know how to get to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of times those were the kids who were posting really troubling things. And so I felt like I'd rather be able to look at it myself.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: When my kids, before they were 13, I also had their Instagrams mirrored on my phone, which was really important for their direct messages.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Because I could go in every single day and see who's DMing them, even if it's in their hidden folders, and delete it. Or even with school drama, if I saw my kid being mean to somebody or something,
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: I could be like, hey, hey, hey, come here. I feel like this would hurt this person's feelings, what you wrote right there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just hearing how much work you're putting into this, the first thing that occurs to me is that so many parents probably just can't find the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if they're choosing the path of least resistance, they're probably choosing to just say, hey, be careful on Instagram, but have a good time because I know how much you want to be on that platform.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: But it doesn't take a lot of time. It just takes the ability to acknowledge it's a problem and have the conversation without saying oh i think you're turning into a racist oh i think you're becoming anti-semitic or oh i think you're dumb that you fell for this or any of these awful things.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And then approaching it with compassion and recognizing that child's goodness inherent goodness in order to draw them into understanding and being compassionate toward other people.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: I just had a talk with my kids. I wrote a Twitter thread that turned into an op that turned into a whole guide for parents everywhere. We'll talk about that in a moment on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But with your rent, frequently you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines,
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more. Your home isn't just where you sleep. It's your community and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you're ready to travel, they say Built points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world. You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining built.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun. That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. Add a statement shoe to your collection, like the calf-hair loafers from Steve Madden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or tap into your romantic side, with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC. You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads, or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide. Shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're back. It's Today Explained. Joanna Schroeder is a mom who writes about gender and parenting and wants parents to pay closer attention to what their kids are doing online.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We spoke after the Buffalo shooting, but before the Texas shooting. Which is more of an indictment of this country's gun policies than anything else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyhow, I asked her what she made of the Buffalo shooting, considering how much she's thought about what kids are exposed to online.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'll be totally candid and tell you that before I knew what motivated him, I knew what motivated him. You don't have to hear that this many Black people were shot by a white person to know that this was about race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was not a coincidence. Before I knew that he drove all those miles to get there, I knew it was a racist massacre.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When I saw a picture of the kid, I said, he was radicalized online. I left room to be wrong, but I assumed right away that this was a kid who probably started hearing things when he was involved with video games,
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Probably started laughing at bigoted memes, and then just traveled down a wormhole into, you know, the equivalent of 8chan and the dark web. And being totally propagandized to and fed a nonstop stream of disinformation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In this particular case with the shooter in Buffalo, video games definitely played some role in radicalization, in streaming the thing live on Twitch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've been talking about this video game influence on kids and in mass shootings forever. One of the most vicious games is called Mortal Kombat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The objective is to finish off your opponent violently. Another method is decapitation. But does this just further make the point that there is some tangible connection here?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Video games are not the problem. The unsupervised nature of how kids use them might be part of the problem. And it is hard to separate video games from this because we've seen a few stills, and hopefully none of us have had to watch the actual footage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it looks like a first-person shooter. And you're right, he streamed it on Twitch as if he were streaming a game of Minecraft.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a statement, it says, Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against violence and works swiftly to respond. It says, we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in light of what happened in Buffalo, it seems like this response is no longer enough. How are parents supposed to know when it's tipping over? When it's not just their kid looking at a meme that's problematic and it's maybe our kid is trying to find a gun?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, is it just this constant babysitting, which most parents don't have the time for? When do parents step in and say, we need to get you help? You have to prepare them early.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If your kid's already 18 and you haven't prepared them, you have to prepare them now to see racist media and to interpret it and to debunk it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the most important thing to me is almost no parent listening to this right now, no grandparent, no teacher is going to have a child that kills people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But almost all of us could have a child that makes a racist joke, that makes another kid feel unsafe, knowingly or unknowingly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Almost any of us on here could have a child that shares a racist meme that hurts the feelings of somebody else. Or if you have to look at it this way, gets them in trouble in school or makes them lose their spot on their baseball team or makes them lose their scholarship that they already secured to Dartmouth,
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That there are consequences for your teen. But even more importantly, there are consequences to the kids of color, the Jewish kids, the queer kids, the trans kids around them who are hurt by their casual, harmful language.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You wrote a Twitter thread that turned into an op-ed column that turned into a guide that you co-wrote called Confronting Conspiracy Theories and Organize Bigotry at Home, a guide for parents and caregivers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's in it?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: The first thing we do is talk about the basic history of like why this is happening and why kids are so easily influenced.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And then we also talk about some warning signs that come up when your kid is being influenced at any sort of stage. We have the beginning stages like my kids were in where they didn't even know what they were saying,
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: All the way to signs that they're actually joining with groups and may do dangerous things. And then some very specific tools and talking points for the kids.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Most parents don't know how to talk about racism, even in general, let alone how to talk to a kid and engage them.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Because ultimately, we want our kids to feel like they can come to us and talk to us and not feel shamed or blamed. Because that shame and blame is what pushes them to these groups.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: The thing that neo-Nazi groups and modern white nationalist groups want is for kids that feel disenfranchised to have a family in their organization.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And whether it's skinheads recruiting in a back alley in the 1980s or today on Discord or wherever else. From there, the shooter moved to Discord, a chatting platform popular with young gamers.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: He wrote a racist manifesto and kept an online diary detailing the planning and execution of a racially motivated attack.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: It's the same kind of thing. The more disillusioned they become with their parents, the more likely they are to believe what they hear in these groups.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: And the more likely they are to become very loyal to them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You make it sound kind of easy, Joanna, and it just feels like it's one of the hardest things because teenagers are incredibly hard to approach sometimes,
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whether or not they're in the process of planning a mass shooting. They balk at parents getting more involved in their lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you're talking about not only getting more involved, but really engaging them on some complicated ideologies and some complicated phenomena that we haven't really come to terms with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do you tell parents who say, yeah, I tried that and now my kid just never talks to me or my kid's hiding their phone or my kid does everything elsewhere with his friends and then comes home and, you know, is just a wall?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Yeah, I mean there's two kind of messages. First if you have little kids understand that by the time they're 12 and especially by the time they're 14 they're not going to want to talk to you about it so you start now and you include them in media analysis.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Whether it's some messaging in the little mermaid that makes you uncomfortable when they're six if i become human i'll never be with my father or sisters again.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: That's right. But you'll have your man. Life's full of tough choices in it. Or watching Friends and seeing some low-key homophobic or racist stuff and they're 12.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Question. You're not dating anybody, are you? Because I met somebody who would be perfect for you. He is cute. He's funny. He's a he?
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: Well, yeah. Oh, God. I just, I feel like, good, Shelly. Okay. I'm just going to go flush myself down the toilet now. Okay. Bye-bye.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: You start then, but if your kid is a teenager now, yeah, I understand. It's terrifying. Try and be engaging instead of, I know you're doing this bad thing.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: There are levels at which you should involve a therapist who specializes in children and adolescents and have family therapy it can really help because a therapist can help take some of that mom's just trying to control me push back out of the conversation be objective but also yeah if you think your kid's trying to acquire a gun you gotta call the cops and that sucks.
--:-- Joanna Schroeder: But hopefully everything else that you do before that will prevent them from getting to that point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a lot for parents. That's why it's important that this whole process becomes institutionalized and that PTAs are talking about it and schools are talking about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that you're talking to your principals and PTAs and educators about it. Sports groups, churches, temples, every organization that has any influence over kids should understand the dynamics at play so that we can do this systematically and not just me over here in my little house with my two teenage children or you over there wherever you live with your teenage children.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Avishay Artsy. He had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Paul Robert Mounsey, and me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. This was an episode of Today Explained that really helped our team wrap our heads around a tough moment this year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll bring you another such episode tomorrow. Until then. Thank you. Thank you.
