DVIR ABRAMOVICH: The algorithm is warping teen boys’ minds with non-stop hate
DVIR ABRAMOVICH: More than a quarter of young Aussie men believe political violence can be justified. That’s music to the ears of radical recruiters looking for dupes to carry out their sick bidding.
The phone belonged to a 15-year-old who did not exist.
Researchers in Britain built 10 TikTok accounts like it, registered each one as a 15-year-old, and let them scroll for a fortnight. Within hours, through stickers, songs and comment threads, the feeds were serving Holocaust memes, neo-nazi imagery and far-right codes, often without the accounts ever searching for them. “A mere matter of hours,” one of the researchers said.
Keep that phone in your hand. Now look at what Australia’s young men told pollsters this year.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Today’s McKinnon Index, a Roy Morgan survey of more than 4000 Australians, finds that 27.5 per cent of men aged 18 to 24 agree it is sometimes justified to use extreme measures such as violence to advance a cause they care about. A year ago it was 19.3 per cent. Among young women, the figure fell. Among young men, it jumped eight points in 12 months.
Only 56 per cent of those young men now say democracy is preferable to any other kind of government. That is a fall of more than 10 points in a single year.
Read that again, slowly. More than one in four of the young men who will coach our junior footy teams, join our police forces and raise our grandchildren believe violence can, in the right circumstances, be fair play.
Most of them will never raise a fist. Saying violence can be justified is not the same as committing it, and the pollsters themselves warn against reading too much into one year. But extremists have never needed a majority. They need a handful to act and a crowd to shrug. Hate has never needed an army. It needs an audience. If I were a recruiter, I would have read today’s survey as a shopping list.
And here is the question the survey did not ask. Violence for which cause? Against whom?
Australia’s spy chief has already answered it. In June, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the nation that “hatred of Jews is one thing virtually all the violent extremist cohorts have in common”. Neo-nazis. Islamist extremists. Anarchists and revolutionaries. Movements that, in his words, “despise each other”, and yet “are united by a common hatred”.
The causes are different. The target is not.
Pick any cause a teenager can be sold through a screen: the white race, the caliphate, the revolution, the rotten “system”. Scroll far enough and the same villain is waiting at the bottom of every feed. The Jew. That is why anti-Semitism is not a side effect of radicalisation. It is the entry ticket. Researchers at George Washington University called it “a key entry point”. In America, a University of Chicago study for the Anti-Defamation League found that people who hold many anti-Semitic beliefs are about three times as likely to back political violence on the right, and up to twice as likely on the left.
Watch how fast it works. When Charlie Kirk was shot dead in Utah last year, the ADL counted more than 72,000 posts on X declaring “Israel killed Charlie Kirk”. Prosecutors charged a 22-year-old. The internet charged the Jews.
The same pipeline runs straight into Australian bedrooms. ASIO says the median age of the minors it first investigates is now 15, and around 85 per cent are male. Last week the AFP told Senate estimates that in 55 youth counter-terrorism cases between 2020 and 2025, every one involved a boy aged 12 to 17, and every one was radicalised wholly or partly online. Research commissioned by the Federal anti-Semitism envoy found anti-Semitic attitudes are highest among 18-to-24-year-olds, and that high school boys were more likely to move in circles where anti-Semitic “humour” was normal.
Join the dots. A generation of boys raised by an algorithm. A growing share of them prepared to excuse violence. And a feed that has already told them who deserves it.
Australian Jews do not need a survey to tell us who stands first in line when a generation decides violence is negotiable. Fifteen people went to a Chanukah celebration at Bondi last December and never came home. We have already seen where this hatred ends. It ends on a beach, on the first night of the festival of lights.
The algorithm needed hours. Governments have had years.
On December 18, Commissioner Virginia Bell will hand down the final report of the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion. It must include a chapter on the radicalisation of boys. It must name anti-Semitism as the thread that ties every extremist cohort together, exactly as ASIO already has. And it must tell governments and the platforms precisely what they will do about the feed, with deadlines and consequences, not another round of consultation.
Because 27 per cent is a recruiting pool, and the recruiters have already read the survey.
The 15-year-old on that phone was never real.
Yours is. Go and look at his feed tonight.
