“I’m a 35 year old teacher,” a user complained in the Reddit forum r/Qult_Headquarters. “My mom has fallen to the QAnon cult because of this 15-year-old named Reed Cooper. He is popular in the Trump community and holds live streams… Why would such an adorable kid do such a thing?”
Reed Cooper, a smug blond boy in a Sunday school tie and blazer combo who festoons all his social media with American flags, is already a visual argument for the return of corporal punishment. But this reverse-Pied Piper is also the emissary of a more disturbing trend. Boomer radicalisation.
American Millennials always used to moan about their parents being “radicalised” by Fox News. While part of this was younger people complaining that their parents didn’t have the views of a Williamsburg dillettante, there was also a whisp of truth to it. A mono-diet of Hannity, the narrow wedge of talking points the station offers, can become velcro to which every other thought then sticks. The sadness was that the complaint was as much about parents subsiding into increasingly narrow and lonely lives — in which the fritzing hearth of TV is left to fill gaps in the home left by bereavement, retirement or illness.
But for some of that generation, the same comforting spool of “everyone’s talking about” content is now to be found in the infinite-scroll of social media. Mainly, on Facebook.
It’s long been obvious that Facebook is greying. Take the figures for UK users: in the period 2017-2018, Facebook shed some 400,000 18-24 year olds. For 25-44, the figures were flat, meaning that the only age groups still growing were 45-plus, with the over 65 cohort growing the most — up by 300,000 users. There are now more 65-plus users of Facebook than there are aged between 13 and 17.
In December 2018, Newsweek concluded that, for the first time in nearly a decade, less than half of all teenagers in the United States were visiting Facebook at least once in a month. The impact of that swing was becoming a vicious cycle: “this silver surge… had the knock-on effect of pushing younger people away from Facebook.”
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