After the Parkland shooting, the Left had David Hogg and the Right had Kyle Kashuv: two youngsters to promote their respective worldviews on the Second Amendment.
I find it depressing that politicos pimp out children so casually these days. After all, what easier way to promulgate your personal political positions than using minors as mouthpieces. They’re cherubic and often quick-witted, and once opposition actively engages with them, you can just lambaste criticism as unfairly attacking children. It’s the equivalent of terrorists using children as human shields.
Unfortunately, the internet has paved a path for kids not to just occupy this role, but to also radicalize them by the very act. And adults are cheering on this form of child-manipulation, all the while criticizing those who dare point it out.
BuzzFeed News’ Joseph Bernstein has come under criticism for writing an article investigating a 14-year-old girl with a YouTube channel. As Bernstein writes, she still “lisp[s] through braces],” and by any objective measure, she could visually pass for being as young as 10. BuzzFeed dedicated thousands of words to the child and her online presence.
BuzzFeed has published a lengthy hit piece on a 14-year-old girl in an attempt to get her deplatformed.
Yes, really.https://t.co/6X4H2NtZzn
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) May 14, 2019
But Bernstein’s piece, save for his central conclusion that YouTube ought to engage in more censorship, is exactly right. Adults need to stop signal-boosting an emergent class of children radicalized by both the far-left and far-right online. And the 14-year-old who goes by “Soph” online is Patient Zero of the moment.
As Bernstein details, Soph’s internet presence began innocuously enough, deep in the world of gaming and then slowly metastasizing into the realm of the alt-right.
Now she dons garb mocking conservative Muslims, jesting:
Some of her videos mock “betas” and the stupidity of the female sex, espousing an ideology that, spoken by any male, would reek of incel-style psychosis.
Bernstein’s central thesis posits some obvious objections:
Bernstein’s not wrong that social media platforms have an ethical obligation to monitor speech that flirts with illegality in sexual threats and musings against minors. But he misses the greater problem here: It’s up to people as a whole to stop platforming and elevating children who don’t even look like they’ve yet hit puberty as political forces.
For most of us, our views have matured and become more nuanced since we were 14. This would be far less likely if the adults in our lives had put us up to or allowed us to engage in outrageous trolling that turned us into online celebrities. It’s less free speech and more potentially on-camera child abuse. Who knows how screwed up I would’ve turned out if adults had rewarded me with attention and plaudits for the most extreme ideas I proposed at that age? How far would I or anyone else in that position have leaned into the most provocative of my musings?
Lost in the debate about social media is the individual responsibility to consume and promote content ethically. Adults ought to know better than catapult clearly troubled children to alt-right superstardom. Free speech is the cornerstone of Western society. YouTube ought not ban Soph, but we can still understand that elevating her public profile is irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst.
