Preventing online radicalization and extremism in boys

A conversation with Pasha Dashtgard

Misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate made news headlines recently when a series of Twitter exchanges with environmentalist Greta Thunberg appeared to land him in a Romanian jail. Those news stories were the first time many Americans became aware of Tate. However, according to a February article in Education Week, teachers are seeing an increase in misogynistic remarks among preteen and teenage boys, which can be attributed to exposure to extremist social media influencers like Tate and others.

Boys don’t stumble into this toxic online world by accident. Male supremacist groups target boys and young men through popular social media platforms like Twitch and Discord, according to Pasha Dashtgard, who studies online extremism. He is the director of research at American University’s Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) and is an assistant professor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at AU, which is in Washington, D.C.

Dashtgard is a social psychologist whose dissertation research focused on male supremacy and online radicalization. Before that career switch, he was a mental health professional, working as a school counselor, substance abuse counselor, social worker, and therapist. His desire to help as many people as possible led him to reconsider his career path. “If you want to help people, you have to address system-level problems,” he said. “That’s how I got interested in social psychology and how to develop policies and interventions for mental health and wellness that scale so you can reach more people effectively.”

PERIL founders Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Brian Hughes started the organization three years ago. During the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, PERIL and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) realized that the pandemic could make online extremism worse. “COVID has meant that all the kids are moving online for school instruction. It has meant that working parents are busier than ever on the computer and doing remote work, so they can’t monitor what their kids are doing on the internet as well,” said Dashtgard. “The extremists are on the computer more, and in that same moment young people are also on the computer more. Add in pandemic-related conspiracy theories and a cascade of misinformation online and it was a perfect storm of factors.” Miller-Idriss and Hughes formed a partnership with the SPLC to create a parent and caregiver guide to online extremism that was “a rapid response to COVID,” Dashtgard said. The research-based guide was later expanded into a general guide for other trusted adults, and the organizations offer supplemental resources.

Dashtgard spoke with Phi Delta Kappan about how boys and young men get involved with online extremism, how toxic masculinity hurts men and women, and the crucial role of teachers.

PHI DELTA KAPPAN: Why is prevention of extremism so important?

DASHTGARD: A lot of the work in this area is deradicalization, which is hard to do. For example: How do you deprogram a cult member? It takes years and very individualized treatment regimes. At PERIL, we equip parents, teachers, caregivers, grandparents, after-school coaches, and mental health professionals with knowledge and tools to intervene before boys become radicalized and that work becomes much more difficult.

So much of the radicalization that happens is between friends. It’s happening socially. It’s subtle. How do you become socialized into believing that women are inferior or believing that if you as a boy haven’t lost your virginity by the time you’re in college, that you’re a failure of a man? You’re not arming yourself to go kill people yet. But those ideologies and beliefs set you down that path toward radicalization.

PERIL is also non-carceral. Don’t call the police unless you absolutely have to. Try to intervene at the level of parent, at the level of principal or teacher or trusted adult. That’s the level of intervention that we’re going for. It’s so much better to start working with parents and other trusted adults in the lives of children. PERIL has developed a couple of resources. One of them is the parent and caregiver guide. Another one is a community guide. And then a third is a toolkit for higher education. PERIL’s philosophy is to give parents and noncustodial adults tools and knowledge so that they can intervene with kids. You’re creating a society-wide intervention to prevent radicalization and extremism.

KAPPAN: What’s happening with middle school and high school boys and young men?

DASHTGARD: There are many different layers to this question. One layer is that a lot of boys and young men are playing video games. Those are spaces that distribute a lot of hateful speech, hateful ideologies. We know that white supremacist groups and extremist groups go to these online forums like Twitch, Discord, and YouTube to recruit young people. Any social media platform can be a radicalizing platform.

What’s happening is a combination of social factors, digital technology factors, and people taking advantage of insecurities in young men. Boys and young men are being targeted. Of the mass public shootings in academic settings since 1900, 100% of the shooters were men, according to a study by Ragy R. Girgis and their research team at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). From a statistics standpoint, it’s a variable worth exploring.

We have done a very good job in the last 20 to 30 years of talking about feminism. The cultural shifts have been significant, and the cultural gains have been significant enough that we’ve, in some sense, abandoned the old masculine ideal of man as the head of the household, and the father goes to work with the wife and the kid at home. That isn’t the hegemonic masculine ideal for boys anymore. But we haven’t provided a strong replacement for those traditional male gender roles. That gap has given opportunities to scammers and grifters — people who are willing to just say whatever needs to be said to make money and gain fame and popularity.

COVID created, in some ways, the worst possible situation for online radicalization because it affected everyone in the world, and it pushed us all into physical isolation. It increased our reliance on and use of digitally mediated communication and technology.

I’ll speak for myself as somebody who researches this stuff. Over and over, I just see a bunch of hucksters and snake oil salesmen. It started with the pickup artists trying to tell you, “Oh, if you do this, and you do that, you wear a goofy hat and if you insult a woman at the bar, then she’s going to sleep with you.” What started as a self-help concept for men transitioned into a worldview and an ideology that was just male supremacy. We now have a whole ecosystem of male supremacist groups and entities that all share a similar fundamental ideology that gives boys and young men an incredibly toxic and negative framework for interpreting their life experience.

They start with something that 13- to 18-year-old boys can relate to: “I struggle to talk to women. I’m nervous around the person I’m attracted to. I feel a little weird about my sexual experiences or lack thereof.” Then they’re given this framework that says, genetically you look and are born with the wrong features, so you’re going to die alone. And it’s women’s fault that you’re going to die alone. This is a plot by women and Jews to emasculate you and to undermine you.

People forget how much of a burden virginity is for young men. They believe: “I need to lose my virginity, otherwise I am not tough. I’m not doing the ‘man’ thing the way that I ought to be.” It can become an obsession. This male supremacist ideology centers sexual prowess as the only measure of your worth and value as a man. How many women have you bedded? How many women can you trick into having sex with you? If that number is the only way that you can achieve masculine success, that’s a real heavy burden.

Andrew Tate isn’t selling antisemitism up front, but it trickles out afterward. These boys say, “I’m feeling really insecure and nervous because I’m a teenager, but now I have an ideology that tells me that this is somebody else’s fault.” And it’s so fatalistic. They call it the “black pill,” which is this idea that you must accept the ultimate truth, which is really just nihilism. The message is, “kill yourself, because there’s no hope.” In these forums, there’s so much talk of suicide. This ideology is so hateful, and not just to others. It makes boys feel fundamentally inadequate, comparing themselves to a standard that is not achievable. This is the kind of online world that these boys enter. Online digital radicalization is not an accident. This stuff is pushed on them.

 KAPPAN: What role did COVID play in increased online extremism?

DASHTGARD: COVID created, in some ways, the worst possible situation for online radicalization because it affected everyone in the world, and it pushed us all into physical isolation. It increased our reliance on and use of digitally mediated communication and technology. Social media is not our friend. It’s not there to give us wonderful, strong meaningful connections. It’s there to keep us engaged.

Social media companies found that the more they stoke anger and fear, the more they can keep you engaged with their site, platform, or app. And during COVID, parents said, “If I’m working on the computer, and you’re going to school on the computer, let’s be a little bit more relaxed about screen time.” Those things created a space where radicalization can occur.

KAPPAN: We know that toxic masculinity and misogyny hurts girls and women. How does it affect boys?

DASHTGARD: Increased rates of suicide and suicidal ideation, increased rates of substance abuse disorders and addiction, increased rates of loneliness, a lack of emotional processing. There’s this term called alexithymia, which is an inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions. If you think about the emotional stunting that happens with boys and men, we’re socializing and acculturating into our boys a lack of ability to recognize how they feel and then process it. Talking about your feelings is effeminate nonsense, right?

Think of the consequences of that. I don’t know how to deal with my emotions; therefore, I’m going to drink, I’m going to use drugs, I’m going to numb myself out with food, pornography, gambling, and other forms of self-medication. These are the downstream consequences of male supremacist ideology. What a boy is allowed to be is so small and so limited. The tragic consequence of toxic masculinity and male supremacy and misogyny is the way it hurts boys, making it so they feel like they can’t play sports and read poetry. They can’t enjoy being artistic and working outside with their hands. These things feel like they’re in opposition to each other, and not something that can be integrated into a whole person.

KAPPAN: How much of boys and young men making misogynistic statements in school and in class is done for the shock value?

DASHTGARD: Part of what makes this stuff so pernicious is that it comes off as a joke. “I’m just joking. I’m just being ridiculous. I’m just saying things to get people riled up.” But what we see when we study this stuff is that what starts out as a joke then becomes normalized. It works like a filtering system. If you start out as a joke and nobody pushes back, then you get to make a more offensive joke, and you keep pushing until you hit a limit.

Now, because of digital communities, you can just move into a community where they’re not going to hit that limit, and where, especially if you’re in a place that doesn’t have online moderation, you’re going to be able to do whatever. You start with the “make me a sandwich” joke directed at women. And you move into jokes about Black people. Then you move into jokes about Jews and ovens. It escalates quickly. If everything is permitted, then you see a real steep escalation in the level of toxicity.

Teachers should have a conversation with their class around media literacy. This is a skill everyone should have in 2023. You should know what’s happening on the internet. You should have conversations about misinformation and disinformation. You should have conversations about propaganda.

Part of it is definitely trying to push boundaries, trying to be cool with all the jokes. “Nothing offends me; I’m cool with everything people say.” This stance comes from a position of privilege. The people who say that tend not to be the targets of racial epithets. They tend not to be insulted with slurs about their sexuality or their gender. They frame saying this horribly offensive thing as enacting their freedom of speech. Jokes embed themselves and normalize this stuff. These extremist groups know they can transmit these ideas more easily through jokes and memes.

KAPPAN: You talked about the importance of prevention. What kind of prevention work can teachers and educators do?

DASHTGARD: Teachers should have a conversation with their class around media literacy. This is a skill everyone should have in 2023. You should know what’s happening on the internet. You should have conversations about misinformation and disinformation. You should have conversations about propaganda.

What PERIL has shown with our research is that people need what we call an attitudinal inoculation. If I just try to debate with you using facts, that doesn’t work. You can’t tell them, “No, you’re wrong and here’s the study to prove it.” What we see in social psychology is that just pushes people further to the fringes. People who agree with the fact are going to feel more strongly and have stronger convictions in their belief. And the people who disbelieve that fact are going to feel even more conviction in their belief.

Instead, you try to engage people on an emotional level. You say, “here are some strategies that people are going to use to manipulate you. They think that you’re a chump. They think that you can be tricked, and so they’re going to try and fool you with these tactics.” If you give people that knowledge, then the next time they see that kind of propaganda, they’re less likely to accept it and more likely to scrutinize it. We found through a recent study that you can inoculate people against scientific racism and male supremacist ideology by giving people these strategies. You show them a one-minute video, and you tell them what’s going to happen: “You’ll hear cherry-picking of statistics. You’ll hear ominous music and see a black background with red letters. That will clue you in that you’re about to get some BS thrown your way.”

Another thing that teachers can do is have a conversation at the outset of their class, where they establish values and guidelines for how they and the students are going to treat each other. They can refer to those guidelines and values when somebody violates them. And we can say, “Hey, remember, we all agreed that we were not going to use slurs and we were not going to degrade people. Well, this is what has just happened.”

If a young boy says some horribly sexist thing, teachers often respond by addressing and shutting down that student in the moment. While it is important that somebody talk to that kid, you also must think about the other students in the class who have now been affected by this toxic rhetoric. A teacher’s primary responsibility is to the people who are impacted by that statement. Another adult can intervene with Timmy to find out what’s going on with him. “Is everything all right at home? Where did you hear this kind of thing? What are you doing on the internet?” But the teacher has to address the rest of the classroom. That creates community resilience, so that if there were other little budding Timmys, or Timmy’s friends who might not have spoken up but agree with him, they will realize, “Oh, we’re a community. We don’t treat each other like this. This has caused harm. I’m hearing from my other classmates in this room.”

Teachers, school administrators, school counselors, and parents all have to work together to figure out what the student needs. Sometimes it’s a mental health problem. Sometimes it’s a media consumption problem. Sometimes boys are trying to be like their friends, or they are trying to one-up each other. Teachers can create conditions where these kinds of things don’t happen, or if they do happen, they’re addressed in ways where everybody feels invested in the solutions.

I hope that the materials from PERIL and the SPLC give teachers some confidence that they don’t have to be the anti-male supremacy expert. But if you’re a teacher, can you recognize it? If you do recognize it, there are a lot of ways to treat the situation. You don’t always have to be the therapist or the pastor. But if you’re not going to be that person, then connect the student caught up in these influences to the therapist or the pastor or the after-school coach who can give them the resources that they need.

Resources

Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab: www.perilresearch.com

Building Networks & Addressing Harm: A Community Guide to Online Youth Radicalization: www.splcenter.org/peril-community-guide

The Parents & Caregivers Guide to Online Youth Radicalization: www.splcenter.org/peril-guide-online-youth-radicalization

Western States Center: www.westernstatescenter.org

This article appears in the April 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 7, pp. 30-35.