Experts Say These Seemingly Innocent Social Media Trends Could Sway You To The Far Right
With President Donald Trump's approval rating at its lowest (43%) since he took office this year and fears of a looming trade war, it's easy to wonder how we got here.
Lots of factors converged to get Trump elected, but we can't ignore the influence social media can have in swaying voters toward the right.
Online content creator Jess Britvich has posted multiple videos about the 'alt-right rabbit holes' that target women on social media— just a few that she cites are clean eating, clean-girl makeup, girl dinner and homesteading. In her video, she said they're the 'trends that can lead to the alt-right pipeline. Because while these things aren't inherently conservative or, dare I say, even fascist sometimes, they can be a starting point for a very slippery slope.'
Britvich's videos have received upward of a million views on both TikTok and Instagram.
Britvich told HuffPost she was inspired to make these videos after reflecting on how she, as a millennial, was told over and over that Gen Z was going to help make the country more progressive when they were able to vote.
'And then, it turns out this past election that Gen Z men were one of the big factors in in getting Trump elected, and that kind of got me started to think of, where did this shift come from from?' Britvich said.
If the social media trends Britvich referenced don't go so far as encouraging the alt-right movement, which is against 'political correctness' and criticizes social justice as it's viewed as a 'threat' to white ideology, experts say they certainly do often lead users to right-wing content.
Here's what to know about these trends and how they relate to far-right politics, according to the experts we spoke to.
Lots of people shop for clean beauty products and opt for foods with fewer chemicals; no one is saying that everyone who does these things is on their way to the alt-right pipeline, stressed Britvich.
'That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how the algorithm can indoctrinate you and radicalize you. One does not necessarily equal the other,' Brivitch said.
But the social media algorithm is now set up to push certain political agendas.
During the pandemic, 'people were hungrier than ever for agency in the information they were consuming and relying on for their own safety and their family's safety ... but ... you really weren't actually able to search for content without then having it lead you down pathways — some people will say rabbit holes,' said Jiore Craig, a resident senior fellow of digital integrity at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue. Craig studies how online content can harm society.
'A mom searching for what to do about her child's allergy, or a mom searching for her horoscope reading that day, would have equally been led, likely, to anti-vaccine content during COVID, just because of the way that the suggestions were being made, and how prominent the topic of vaccines and COVID became in the context of all these other cultural topics,' Craig noted.
We may be years out of lockdown, but this has only continued today.
'A lot of the groups that had stakeholders in the COVID conversation were political stakeholders, and the far right in particular took a position anti-science, anti-vaccine, and that has carried forward to this administration and their positions on many of these things,' Craig said.
'I like to eat healthy, I'm expecting a kid, so you would not imagine the amount of stuff that is coming at me all the time about being 'clean,'' said Catherine Tebaldi, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Luxembourg.
'What I'm noticing around clean beauty, first, is there's a lot of very much these eugenic discourses of purity, bodily purity, pureness in your food, pureness in your makeup, that is very closely aligned to white supremacists [and] eugenics,' Tebaldi noted.
It's also not clear what these terms like 'clean,' 'non-toxic' and 'natural' mean.
'Even words that we're using, like clean, what does that even mean? And from there, just unregulated terms like saying things like, 'oh, bad chemicals.' Well, everything's a chemical. Water is a chemical,' said Brivitch.
'These are unregulated terms that don't really mean anything, but they get an emotional response,' Brivitch added.
While opting to use makeup that contains fewer chemicals is not a bad thing, where this could go via the social media algorithm is not ideal.
'This can kind of lead to this anti-science rhetoric and this distrust in our regulatory bodies, which then leads down this path of, 'OK, well, this is toxic. What else is toxic?' And the more you start rejecting science, it could trend closer and closer to what I think has a huge impact on what we're seeing with anti-vax, the rise of measles, etc. It just opens the gateway to these larger ideological shifts,' said Brivitch.
Going back to the 'ancestor's way of living,' tradwives, homesteading and a more 'natural' life are more social media rabbit holes that often come up via gardening videos, cooking content and more. While these topics have some admirable qualities, they, too, can lead to some of these problematic pipelines.
'It's an ideological construction of, what is natural, that uses this idea of nature and beauty to signal what? You're meant to be desired,' said Tebaldi.
'It's propaganda ... you're supposed to be glowing and look really healthy and beautiful and this is sort of signaling that you're worthy,' Tebaldi said.
It also feeds into this idea of looking at medicine and health care as 'unnatural,' Tebaldi added.
More, going back to the way the ancestors lived is a very privileged, very white idea — Black people with enslaved ancestors, Japanese people whose ancestors were wrongly imprisoned and forced to do labor in the U.S. or Jewish people with ancestors who died during the Holocaust.
'Nobody should want to return to that, but I think that the returning to a time before women had the right to vote, returning to a time before the abolition of slavery, this is definitely a feature of it,' said Tebaldi.
When it comes to comes things like 'girl dinner' and 'girl math' it's a little more nuanced — having a snacky dinner of your favorite foods is fun, and finally purchasing a pair of shoes you've been eyeing is equally fun, but Brivitch noted that categorizing these types of things as 'girl' can be problematic.
'Just the overall trend promotes the infantilization of women in a time when our reproductive rights are on attack ... and this infantilization almost kind of promotes this idea of like, 'Oh yes, it's girl math. We don't understand this, we don't know what's best for us,'' Brivitch added, 'and it can be a dangerous way to go and just a way to shift public opinion.'
It also erases nonbinary folks and promotes gender essentialism, Brivitch said, meaning women have certain traits while men have certain traits and there's no in-between (which we know is not true). More, this is reflected in politics, as Trump recently signed an executive order that states the U.S. will only recognize two sexes.
'One of the things I'm consistently frustrated with is the way in which people who try to tackle some of these challenges miss the fact that a lot of what makes these challenges possible is the systemic problems that people are facing in their real, offline lives,' said Craig.
Many women deal with burnout, loneliness and frustration when it comes to finding a partner, which makes these alternatives — things like homesteading, clean beauty and finding a community of like-minded folks online — appealing and is why these alternatives to these problems get popular, according to Craig.
'So, whenever I see any of this, let's take clean beauty, or let's take raw milk, I think about the ways that the system has failed people in terms of them feeling confident that the system is going to keep their kids safe, or that the system is going to keep chemicals out of their kids' food,' Craig said.
These social media trends also put the onus on the individual, which is not actually how a healthy society operates.
'To be healthy, you shouldn't, say, have a better environment, better social determinants of health, better medical care, but instead, it's about the practices that you do that make you the most healthy, or your 'innate better genetics,' said Tebaldi.
Until some of the systemic reforms necessary for the the health of Americans happen, there will continue to be versions of this, added Craig.
Craig said there are a few helpful things to keep an eye out for when using social media. Remind yourself that what you're seeing in your social media feed is designed to keep you online, and that's true across the board, whether you're looking at left-leaning or right-leaning content. More, know that creators want you to watch videos to the end because it helps them make money.
'Ideally, we'll sort of get folks' guards up,' Craig added.
Craig also recommends that you click through to bios and websites to learn more about the influencers you follow and see who's involved in their content or who's paying for their account. For these influencers who are trying to sell you a certain political message, they'll be funded by organizations that lean a certain way.
'And then any opinion that you are hearing about that is making you close to changing a part of your lifestyle, you should double check. You should check multiple sources, not just with your friends. You should look for, is there anyone out there who has said anything about this being a trap before? Have you really done enough research to warrant a behavior change?' Craig added.
It's hard to give very specific advice as this content shows up differently depending on the platform you're on and depending on what content you're consuming, but these blanket reminders can be useful for building up resistance overall, Craig said.
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