California writer and mother Joanna Schroeder had a message to other moms of white teen boys in a tweet that went viral: White supremacists online are paying attention to young men’s social media use, even if you are not.
Do you have white teenage sons?
Listen up.
I’ve been watching my boys’ online behavior & noticed that social media and vloggers are actively laying groundwork in white teens to turn them into alt-right/white supremacists.
Here’s how:
— joanna schroeder (@iproposethis) August 13, 2019
While guns, burning crosses and even tiki torches have been weapons of white nationalists, so have memes, blogs and coded internet language.
“First, the boys are inundated by memes featuring subtly racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic jokes. Being kids, they don’t see the nuance & repeat/share,” Schroeder said in a tweet.
Schroeder said she realized white supremacist propaganda was targeted to teen boys when she asked her son if she could look at his Instagram with him. While he was mid-scroll, she said she saw a meme of Hitler in his suggested posts.
“I know my kids understand Hitler, but as I scrolled through his [social media] I saw more memes that joked about the Holocaust and joked about slavery,” Schroeder told CNN.
She told the news outlet that these memes desensitize kids to heavy topics like racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.
Schroeder, a writer with a focus on parenting and gender who has faced hate online for her views, noticed her teen and tween sons using similar language trolls had used against her. She said she decided to dig deeper into where they were learning this language.
It was words like “triggered” that raised red flags for her. Though not racist on their own, alt-right trolls online commonly employ terms like these to invalidate views against racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of xenophobia.
The ideology of “people are too sensitive” or “you can’t say anything these days” is tossed around in alt-right internet circles.
Less mainstream terminology also has more sinister coded double-meanings because they have been co-