Avoid the Red Pill!

 When I detoxed 11 years ago, it was from the internet as much as anything. I use it now with a certain degree of leeriness. It is addictive, it is dangerous. The Guardian's There’s a new tactic for exposing you to radical content online: the ‘slow red-pill’ points out a new danger:

I once followed the work of a group of far-right teenagers who devoted much of their time to radicalising people. The strategy was simple. They’d set up meme pages that, on the surface, appeared to be run-of-the-mill, Republican Maga-type accounts. The bio might read: 📃Free Speech, 🔵 Debate Welcome, 🔴 Make America Great – by all outward appearances it would look like a regular conservative Instagram page. This account would repost high-performing content from big Republican pages (@DC_Draino, @the_typical_liberal, etc) and use the popularity of these images to accumulate a following of Fox, Breitbart and Turning Point USA-type viewers.

About once a week, the account would unexpectedly post extreme content. While regular posts would feature familiar conservative tropes like “having an iPhone means you can’t criticize capitalism” and “Venezuela proves that socialism doesn’t work”, extreme posts would contain racist caricatures and anti-capitalist messaging in favor of white identity.

Think what you are doing when you are online. It is too easy to lose one's self.