You ever hear something that you can’t quite put your finger on, but it just doesn’t feel right? Like, perhaps scrolling through a social media app and you come across a post that leaves you in need to re-watch it in order to truly process what you heard? Well, that’s the point of that content sometimes, and we’re all aware of this; saying controversial things to spike engagement with their videos, and a lot of creators just do it for that reason alone:, to make money. But then there’s communities of creators that genuinely produce this content and preach it to their impressionable audience and even target younger audiences to tap into ‘larger markets.’ Those creators have countlessly been shown to profit off of the communities they build and even promote scams to their audiences, that include our next growing generation of men and the young men around us now.
Somebody close to me in my family, sadly, has been a victim to believing that this online personality’s content is genuine and sadly they do connect to it because the creator says everything that they want to hear. The creator targets insecurities that the majority of men struggle with, but especially the struggles of young men today and today’s teens, as the term market is only ever growing with the rise of social media. They begin to create a community of people who engage with this content and create an echo chamber of misinformation and misogyny that these creators often promote. I’ve asked a friend about this subject and they said, ‘“ I myself have noticed It is more important to men in those communities that they seem like the coolest person. It makes unnecessary competition and it happens a lot in young teen environments, especially online. Finally, when the community is at its peak, the creator can begin to promote ways to support them directly. But, as technology grows everyday, new scams are invented to profit off of the uneducated and misinformed, and the scams that are promoted today can be done by these impressionable teens, not to mention the teens are also influenced to believe to be alone and not at all share your emotions, teaching them poor mental health information in order to make themselves much more ‘masculine’. This leaves a mark on our teens today, and to my close family member whom I’ve grown up with, it’s hard to watch it leave an actual mark on someone and to experience it first-hand is even worse because no matter what you tell them, they are dead set in their beliefs because the content they consume tells them to be.
For example, while in this case the teen had overheard his brother, but, a teenage boy had made 50,000$ scamming people online out of cryptocurrency on two separate occasions and one of which was an apology that he scammed people out of money again, Nonetheless, it shows how our growing generation believes this behavior is okay and acceptable because they themselves have been told that ‘it’s okay’ and it’s a ‘quick way to get rich.’ But sadly, it’s usually the creator they admire selling them a dream that they can’t truly buy because the creator knows that they’re selling a dream; an example being Andrew Tate’s, ‘Hustler’s University’, which was a scam that had promised to one day made him as rich as he was but in reality the people’s selling this too are at the bottom of the wealth distribution and he’s selling them the dream to jump entire social classes in order to become a part of the 1%. Knowing that these impressionable teens will invest their money and time into this genuinely believing that their creator has the best interest for them, when in reality the creator only has the best interest in making profits.
According to the Pew Research Center, ,”Overall, 73% of teens say they go on YouTube daily, making YouTube the most widely used and visited platform we asked about. This share includes 15% who describe their use as “‘ almost constant. ‘” About six-in-ten visit TikTok daily. This includes 16% who report being on it almost constantly. “
It is undeniable that our teens are on social media today, and constantly consuming content that often isn’t taken into consideration of where it’s being promoted too and the target audience that the creator is aiming for.
