Online campaigns like these have helped radicalize a broad swath of Germany’s youth, making extreme-right ideas that were once relegated to the margins of German political discourse increasingly mainstream. The Young Alternative, the AfD youth organization that put out the dance video, has been classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as an extremist group since last year.
You can not fix the limitations of a growing brain. People are getting influenced in a young age, damage that is hard to undo. We can of course limit access (at least in theory) to such content. And then we regulate what? TikTok.
While am RCA goes hast to be done until we either can not further because of physical limitations for example, we must fix the thing closest to the root that can actually be fixed.
Young brains must be able to develop fast. Social media and specifically the short content format have a massive negative impact on this development.
We always had far right propaganda. Social media is what allows it the flourish in the minds of young people, future voters and politicians.
I don’t said that social media is bad or that social media is responsible for far right mindests.
I said: social media is the root cause for the electoral success of the AfD and other far right parties in Europe.
The root cause for far right movements is “the human being”. Of course we could go in depth here about the natural fear of the unknown, and the support dorbfar right parties is higher in places where voters are less like to see “aliens” in their neighborhood. But also, this is here much longer and European youth was left leaning for decades.
So let’s focus on what changed that those parties get so much traction with young voters. Answer: social media
Then maybe say that instead of pointing to social media as the root.
Sigh…
Ok, now you’re just conflating correlation with causation. Also I’ve heard this before: TV and Video Games are to blame, Music is to blame, Newspapers are to blame, Books are to blame…
I’m thinking mental health is overlooked and a big factor in a lot of things. But I don’t see it as root cause. There are other things that contribute to good or bad mental health.
Yeah, there are so many issues with differing root causes that all feed into the symptoms we see in the main OPs article. If we don’t take care of all of them and just concentrate on the easiest target, for example social media, then something else will come along and take its place. Next on the chopping block: VR/AR and AI.