BuzzFeed panics over social media turning kids conservative, warns against moms, muscles, and common sense
April 7, 2025
BuzzFeed is now telling its readers not to go on social media. The irony of this is that BuzzFeed as a company was originally all about social media.
They lived for the clicks, for something going viral.
But now that social media doesn’t trend their way, they’re arguing against it.
Or, perhaps more likely, as they’ve seen that social media is not now a self-reinforcing swamp of the woke and progressive they’re insisting that their young and impressionable readership should not go where they might be – young as they are – impressed by things not woke and progressive.
And they really are saying this:
As the New York Times reported in the aptly named podcast Rabbit Hole, these journeys of right-wing indoctrination often start because the algorithms of platforms like YouTube and TikTok serve users more and more extreme content over time. This steady drip of increasingly charged content keeps people scrolling for longer (which equals more money for social media platforms). It also normalizes more and more extreme views, kinda like the old “frog in a boiling pot” analogy. Things that would have seemed way too extreme if users had seen them before drifting down the pipeline come to seem normal — and even correct — to people who have spent months or years being served increasingly far-right content.
Back when that pipeline led the kids and teens ever further into the progressive worldview, it was not just fine; it was something to build an entire company on top of. Now that normal people express their views online, this cannot be allowed. Who knows what ideas the kids might pick up!
Examples they give of the horrors of online are that some women, perhaps sometimes, might actually like running a home and raising kids. This is “alt-right” apparently. Keeping fit slides into eugenics. There’s even a claim that crystals – yes, “crystals” – is something right wing that must be avoided. Oh, and “celebrities”.
Effectively, the claim is that everything that isn’t the wholly approved, progressive, woke, and politically correct content is just a gateway to people becoming right-wing. Or, as those of us not progressives and woke would describe it, “normal”.
But then, that’s the point BuzzFeed is trying to make to its young and impressionable audience. Being normal isn’t allowed these days, which is why everyone must stay away from anything that makes them so.
You know that “Go woke, go broke” idea? There really is a reason why BuzzFeed’s stock price is down 95% in only 3 years.