'Do you have white teenage sons? Listen up': How racist groups are recruiting boys online

A barrage of recent reports have revealed how online platforms popular with kids are used as tools for extremists looking to recruit. Earlier this year, a viral essay inmagazine - written by an anonymous mother who chronicled a harrowing, year-long struggle to reclaim her teenage son from the grips of alt-right extremists who had befriended him online - sparked a flurry of passionate discussions and debates among parents across social media.

"White nationalist and alt-right groups use jokes and memes as a way to normalise bigotry while still maintaining plausible deniability," Schubiner says, "and it works very well as a recruitment strategy for young people." "The more I clicked, the more I started to see memes about white supremacy," Schroeder says, "and that's what was really scary."That pattern of escalation is familiar to Christian Picciolini, an author and former neo-Nazi who left the movement in 1996 and now runs the Free Radicals Project, which supports others who want to leave extremist movements."Youth have always been critical to the growth of extremist movements, since the beginning of time.

"The politics, the ideology, wasn't attractive to me at all," Picciolini says. "I didn't even understand it, at 14 years old. But what was attractive was the sense of the identity, community and purpose that the movement provided." Extremist recruiters understand, Noam says, that a child at this age is more likely to respond to the pull of community and a sense of purpose, even if they don't readily identify with a group's core message. For parents who struggle to understand how extremist indoctrination can happen to "good" kids, he says, it's helpful to keep this developmental vulnerability in mind.

Volunteering in the community, engaging with a new hobby, joining a mission-driven club or campaign - these might be ways to redirect a young person, LoCicero says.

If you're giving them a good upbringing, education and talk to them about politics, racism etc from a young age you shouldn't have to be worried

Good advertisement, now the kids know how to be reached.

This is alarmist nonsense. The woman behind this article is an intolerant, authoritarian 'progressive' who wants to force her sons to adopt her own belief system. Heaven help them.

Meanwhile teenagers all over the country are being indoctrinated into far left ideology in plain sight and nobody cares. Racist groups are and always will be a fringe minority.

Those children are researching, thinking and sharing. If their mum doesn't support that can they live with other relatives? I don't want them to be in danger of missing out on participating in public debate. After all, they are children!

Great read. But now, would the herald dare publish one of another group? Because this happens in every culture.

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