The “free range” American childhood that many young adults experienced is hard to come by these days—largely thanks to social media. And while many parents have begun to try and mitigate the effects of social media on their children, few seem to understand one of the internet’s primary dangers: its tendency to lead young people into extremely radical communities.
I know what that looks like because it happened to me.
I grew up in a two-parent household, attended a private Christian grade school, and was confirmed in the Lutheran Church at age 13. But within a year of attending a public high school and using websites like Snapchat and Tumblr, I had been exposed to the extremes of progressivism. A majority of my friends were LGBT-identified, I began following anarchist blogs online, and I dated a boy who wore a hammer-and-sickle belt buckle—all by the age of 14.
None of this would have happened without the internet. My high school didn’t block social media sites from being used on school WiFi servers, meaning that my friends and I spent a majority of our class periods texting each other, scrolling through memes, and digging around on internet blogs. My high school’s WiFi servers were so poorly monitored that people would frequently joke that if you Googled “How do I kill myself?”, you wouldn’t even get called into the guidance counselor’s office.
As a creatively inclined teenager who loved drawing and reading books, I took as many liberal arts classes as possible upon first entering high school. The friends I made in those classes were similarly creative, but were slightly more rebellious. They began adding me to their group chats, Discord servers, and FaceTime calls. While they were fairly mild-mannered, if not a bit shy, during the school day, the internet gave them a space to be as provocative and countercultural as they pleased.
No one I met ever “came out” to me in person, but they did so in group chats. Over the course of about six months, three-quarters of my fairly large friend group came out to me as bisexual or gay. One person came out as nonbinary, another as transgender. Sometimes people would ask to be recognized with “they/them” pronouns.
It was in these group chats and midnight Discord call sessions where they began telling me that I must be bisexual too. I had never expressed romantic attraction for another girl, but they insisted otherwise. They forced me to join the school’s RAY Club by physically taking my phone and entering me into the club’s school-sanctioned group chat. When I confusingly asked how I could be bisexual if I’d never felt that kind of attraction, they stated that I was somehow both asexual and bisexual.
In these chats, they also talked about gender dysphoria. One of my friends started injecting themselves with cross-sex hormones. They would film themselves taking the injections and post them onto a private Instagram page, where this individual would also post about their suicidal ideation and struggles with self-harm.
One afternoon, while sitting in art class with this friend, they told me about how they didn’t feel feminine, which is why they had decided to “come out” as a boy. Something of a tomboy myself, I said I sometimes didn’t feel like I fit in with other girls, too.
“Yeah, that’s how it starts,” my transgender friend told me. “You’re probably nonbinary.”
I never followed up on the conversation, but that friend would often send me memes about gender dysphoria or about hating “cisgender” people.
A lot of my friends and I interacted with each other on social media platforms like Instagram and Tumblr. We all had “Finstas,” or fake, private Instagram accounts where we could post things specifically for one another to see. Most of my friends used it to post about mental health struggles or problems they were having at home, in an attempt to garner sympathy from others. When we became upperclassmen, they were often used as ways to show off what drugs people were doing, including Molly and DMT.
Tumblr was perhaps the most extremist social media platform we used. Several of my friends were furries and had extra blogs for each of their ‘fursonas.’ The site didn’t ban porn on it until 2018, meaning that people would frequently post explicit fan art.
I used Tumblr primarily to post about bands that I liked, but I found myself engaging with increasingly radical blogs from people who I didn’t know. Fellow fans of bands like Green Day told me that I should commit crimes as a protest against corporate America. They created pages-long guides on how to cut off Trump-supporting family members. They sent me handmade magazines on the joys of communism and anarchism.
Online and in person, communism was embraced simply because it was countercultural. None of my friends were reading Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, but they loved the symbolism of it anyway. They plastered hammer-and-sickles everywhere they could, from profile photos to t-shirts. We became comfortable calling one another “comrade.”
When my friends started turning 18, they began planning out their surgeries. More and more were receiving cross-sex hormones, and one prepared for a double mastectomy.
Because I never “came out” as a member of the LGBT community, they went deeper into the queer community while I gradually pulled myself out of it. By the time the COVID pandemic hit in our senior year, they were exclusively entrenched in the most radical leftist online communities. By the grace of God, I didn’t follow them.
How many other young adults today are being exposed to similarly extreme communities on social media? And how many will fail to find their way out? Those are the questions every American should be asking as we face increasingly subversive forces that seek to divide the country and radicalize impressionable children.
The reality is that young Americans today are facing a new kind of evil that is being disseminated on social media, and it has the potential to harm even the most normal kids.
