The Alt-Right Pipeline Is The Most Dangerous Threat To Our Youth

In the wake of the Capitol riots that left five people dead, only one question seems to be on people’s minds: how could this happen? Amidst a period of heightening tensions between the political landscapes of the left and right, as well as an election season that saw Democrats take control of the Senate and the Presidency, the true major winner of all the chaos occurring at the moment is the alt-right. For those unaware, the alt-right is an idealization on the far-right side of the political spectrum commonly associated with hate crimes, high levels of misogyny, and extremist violence. With content about the alt-right flooding the airwaves of all major news networks, a main question stemming from the fracas is how individuals themselves develop views extreme enough to become alt-right. The answer to this is simple: while most individuals tend to gain their political views from either their families or the society they are brought up in, the alt-right recruit the youth of the world through a different avenue: an Internet misinformation campaign that has become known as the alt-right pipeline.

The alt-right pipeline is a term used to describe the internet "pipeline" that slowly radicalizes typically young, white men into the ideology of the far/alt-right. Taking advantage of a process of desensitization through social media application algorithms, the alt-right pipeline slowly displays to the viewer more and more radical content without the viewer themselves noticing much of a change. It’s a terrifying prospect, and I should know it well—as a matter of fact, I was radicalized by the very same pipeline in high school.

High school tends to be a rough period in most people’s lives, and for good reason. It’s difficult balancing increases in schoolwork, social spectrum, and responsibility, and is often seen as the first sliver of the real world an individual will experience prior to their freedom found in college and post-scholarly experience.

For me, my transition from middle school to high school was particularly rough. Due to severe social anxiety, I was unable to successfully branch out beyond my friends from back in elementary school, and this led to me struggling throughout my teenage experience. After a terrible freshman year that saw me envelop all of the tendencies of a “try-hard” (think self-humiliation for attention, saying things for shock value, et cetera), I began tenth grade by isolating myself from almost everyone entirely.

That is, I did—until I reached my biology class.

It was in my biology class that I began to open up to the others around me, mainly due to the launch of an app that would become the centerpiece of my own experience with the alt-right pipeline: iFunny. As I looked over the shoulder of a classmate as they scrolled through meme after meme, I was intrigued by the prospect of a social media network consisting solely of humor. I naturally downloaded it.

This was the fatal error that led me down a path of darkness.

As I liked meme after meme, the content appearing on my feed grew darker with each post, and subsequently my taste in humor got edgier and edgier, until eventually my feed was filled with nothing but pure hatred, racism, and extremely violent content. Once videos of beheadings with bass-boosted music and heavily saturated graphics appeared on my feed I should have known to delete the app, but due to the gradual descending indoctrination I experienced due to the app’s warped algorithm I was desensitized to the point where I let out a slight chuckle instead of a sharp gasp.

What I did not know was that by the time I had downloaded iFunny in the fall of 2016, the app had been infiltrated by white supremacists and other hate groups. With iFunny catering to naive teenage boys who had severe self-esteem issues and antisocial tendencies, it was the perfect recruitment ground for these aforementioned groups. And as my feed entered the darkest doldrums of humanity itself, I found my own views growing more hateful in parallel. Suddenly, in my naive eyes, it was cool to hold hatred for individuals with views different than mine. My hatred manifested in various ways: an increased difficulty managing my temper, a growing withdrawal from friends and family, and, potentially most frightening of all, an increased sadistic curiosity about past terrorist attacks, massacres, and acts of international war.

What I remember most about this terrifying time period was my sense of aloneness. I was lost at sea amidst waves of pure hatred, lapping at me with scornful messages and cruel stances on some of humanity’s most dire issues: social justice, climate change, international affairs, and domestic terrorism. Soon I was too angry—too ashamed—to even eat at the same lunch table as my best friends, and would instead travel across campus and eat alone in a quiet hallway, lost in horrific thought and absorbing more and more content from iFunny and YouTube by my lonesome. By the end of tenth grade, my dilapidated boat of sanity had finally overturned and I began to drown in the waves of hatred that had deceivingly courted me not even nine months prior.

When eleventh grade began, my life was fully submerged in quiet hatred. To the outside world I was a quiet, soft-spoken big kid who usually sported a half-smile, but on the inside an entire culture of toxicity was brewing. I was getting close to my breaking point, and the remaining bit of sanity inside my mind was begging for someone, anyone to notice and steer me back to shore.

Thankfully, I rose to the surface again inside the clutches of my metaphorical life raft: the Phædrus program. The Phædrus program was a Socratic-based learning community at my high school composed of juniors and seniors that would meet inside their designated space, the A-School, for the second half of the school day. The program was designed with a social-emotional learning component where students would be able to talk about their lives in confidential peer advisory groups, and this is where I found my escape route from the effects of the pipeline.

As I began to open up more and more in my peer group, the internal toxic suppression of my emotions for the better part of my high-school experience began to dissipate. With each waking day, I was able to internally reflect on the decisions I had made and prejudices I held as a result of my trip down the pipeline—and soon enough I deleted iFunny and haven’t looked back since.

Fighting against the alt-right pipeline is almost an impossibility at this point, as hateful organizations and individuals have spread misinformation to all over the internet, whether it be social media apps like Twitter and iFunny, to the controversial app Parler, and even to websites like 4chan and Reddit. However, the most common location where young boys are indoctrinated by the pipeline is YouTube, and this is where I believe action needs to be taken due to its high use rate by teenagers.

The YouTube alt-right pipeline is something I experienced simultaneously with the iFunny alt-right pipeline. It all began with watching gaming videos on YouTube by channels like Vanoss and PewDiePie, and as I absorbed more and more content solely by male gaming channels my recommended videos began to change. Soon enough the YouTube algorithm began to recommend me videos by creators like iDubbbz, who infamously justified using the n-word, and JonTron, whose rants on white supremacy led to him being effectively blacklisted by the rest of the gaming community. Although I never strayed beyond these content creators, I was recommended scores of videos from Ben Shapiro, PragerU, and white nationalist Richard Spencer, even though I myself never intended to watch any political or hateful content on the platform. The recent rise of individuals like Gypsy Crusader, who is a Nazi YouTuber with a fabricated backstory that makes videos documenting himself going on anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and racist rants on Omegle, is a frightening prospect for our youth. It’s incredibly difficult to protect young teenage boys from this derogatory content, as it tends to become lunchroom discussion and teenage curiosity will only lead them further down the pipeline. But YouTube can—and should—redesign its algorithm to diminish the likelihood of alt-right content appearing in each user’s recommended feed.

What has often been disregarded by many when focusing on the issue of the alt-right pipeline is why young boys are so susceptible to their misinformation. Many blame it on puberty, or the fact that in their adolescence boys are more likely to shape their minds around the content they absorb. However, I see the high susceptibility of young boys as more of a societal flaw. Allow me to explain.

Society in general has trivialized the ability of boys to feel emotion. A good portion of adults believe that crying or displaying emotion of any kind to the world is a sign of perpetual weakness in men, and the stigma surrounding emotional men leads to intense masculine suppression of emotions, withdrawal, and—for a lack of a better word—internal darkness. In other words, young boys are so trivialized for their emotions by the society around them that they bury their true identities inside for fear of the world rejecting them. This leaves them ripe for the picking when an alt-right meme, or an alt-right YouTuber, or even an alt-right post on an internet forum caters to them: they’ve finally found somewhere where people aren’t scared to be themselves, if not for all the wrong reasons. These young men believe they’ve found their place, and begin to form connections with other similarly-suppressed youth that foster into future lives of hatred and internal regret.

The sad truth about the alt-right pipeline is the fact that my story is not unique whatsoever. Countless friends, acquaintances, and even family members have encountered their own versions of the alt-right pipeline. One individual, who prefers to remain anonymous, said that while he was never actually drawn into the alt-right to the point where his political views changed (which he credits in part to his stable home and social life), he is certain that an individual encountering struggles in their life could easily be drawn towards the alt-right community in order to form connections with others.

To end things, I had a conversation with a friend from the very same high school biology class in the middle of writing this piece about our experiences with iFunny, and what he described to me was all too familiar: after he himself downloaded the app, his feed became increasingly radicalized and derogatory, and he recalled to me the same emotional numbness that I had felt while using the app. He was able to make it out after deleting the app, but another classmate of ours was not as fortunate—that classmate has gone on to become an alt-right supporter of the disproven conspiracy theory QAnon and decried to me in a Snapchat message that all forms of journalism excluding those found on Newsmax and OANN were not legitimate sources. It’s a saddening tale that is becoming far too common in this country—early indoctrination leads to lifelong consequences.

For parents out there, my overarching message by writing this piece is simple: have a talk with your children about the content they consume online. Sometimes one misclick of a computer mouse can change an adolescent’s mentality forever.