Joanna Schroeder has a warning for parents of teen and tween white boys: If you don’t pay attention to their online lives, the white supremacists will.
“They’ve studied the way that our young men interact online, and they have looked at what these boys need,” she said. “And they have learned how to fill those needs in order to entice them into propaganda.”
That’s what she found when she asked her own teenager if they could go through some of his social media together.
“He was scrolling quickly, really quickly,” she said. “It was so fast, and he slowed down, and I saw an image of Hitler and I stopped him, and I said, ‘Wait, is that Hitler?'”
It was. A meme depicting Hitler and implying a time traveler would have tipped him off about the future to keep him alive had popped into the boy’s Instagram suggestions.
“I know my kids understand Hitler, but as I scrolled through his [social media] I saw more memes that joked about the Holocaust and joked about slavery,” Schroeder said. The impact, she said, seemed to be “desensitizing our kids to things we should be sensitive to.”
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