Yesterday at work the new hippy kid was listening to some live Dead on YT. Between videos an “ad” popped up talking about left wing bias in media and pointing out how many times conservative media is called out for racism. I skipped without looking at the source or hearing more, but I immediately thought about what might have been in his search history to alorithmically try to recruit him. I’m not assuming he has any right wing ties or sentiments, he seems quite the opposite in fact, but he is a young man from the rural South and I imagine listening to the Dead signals some sort of “searching for identity” trigger. In other words, bait.
My oldest kids are thirteen now. We have been extremely limiting with media acccess. They have no devices other than their Nintendo DS (which they only recently got and lose the second there’s any turmoil), were never allowed to watch unsupervised and then only from an extremely limited and curated list and will never, ever have a smartphone until they move out. We have simultaneously been working with them on media and tech literacy so they’re not “behind” (as if). I don’t regret any of my decisions one bit.
