It’s almost impossible for me to live offline, so I’ll allow myself to discuss a little bit of internet gossip and its offline reality. Maybe I’ll go through some recommendations as well.
Like, I spend a large portion of the day in front of different-sized screens: YouTube essays, movies, texting on Signal, Messenger, Instagram, sending emails, doomscrolling, sharing my accomplishments on Facebook, researching my diagnoses on Reddit, reading news from, well, everywhere, ordering all kinds of shit, googling… you get it.
A week ago, I scrolled past a Reel, which I sadly can’t find any more, where an alt-girl said, “You’re gay, that’s cool, I’m straight,” and went on to ask why everyone online is obsessed with their sexual orientation. She isn’t because she’s cool and straight, I guess. Or is she?
Since my algorithm is AS queer and woke as it could possibly be, meaning in MY Reels, it’s usually straight white girls who express concerns about wokeism, not white gym bros. So for the sake of clarity, henceforth I’ll call this “why is everyone obsessed with their sexual orientation?” Reel just a sexual orientation Reel.
For a year or two, I’ve encountered that some young people think that year 2020 wants its #homophobia back. In woke countries, at least. Most of my straight friends haven’t noticed homophobia happening to non-straight people, and their experience is that it’s over and belongs to the 2020 trend album. It all crystallised when my psychologist, who’s a total ally btw, was shocked after I told her what happened to me in Kopli, and asked, “Is homophobia still a thing?” fr, even in Tallinn? girl…
Scrolling through comments of videos where straight people, um, ask about things (“can’t we even ask any more in this hyperwoke deep state?”), I notice numerous ironic replies because, obviously, homophobia is still a thing. And it’s also the reason why people are STILL talking about their sexual orientation. Because, seeing what’s going on in the world, LGBTQ+ rights are being chopped like trees.
Anyway, moving on from the alt-girlies, who are obsessing about not obsessing over sexual orientation, come videos of babies and women starving to death in Palestine, where Israel is successfully conducting a genocide. This, too, is something I see through social media because Estonian media is not reporting almost anything about it. Or recognising Palestine as a state. Furthermore, there are Sudan and Congo, where, again, children and women are being starved and mass raped, but it’s not in the forefront of the media I consume since they’re black, and Sudan, Congo are geopolitically not so relevant in Eastern Europe, nor do they have a real voice on social media.
I read through one description, felt sad and bad, and kept scrolling, wondering how much I should donate and to where. I’m paranoid because never forget! the scam that was Slava Ukraini. I guess most Estonians feel sus after that scandal.
Then, to use my privilege and to treat my misery, I acquire some laughs from unhinged Instagram posts that tickle something big and slimy inside of me. I can’t see such a diverse set of content anywhere else, and some of it IS quirky and funny and fresh, but then again, it's starting to cross a line. I feel the funny content was subtler a few years ago and now… I’m laughing at ironic posts about gay people, women, activists, disabled people, amid casual thirst traps, workout videos, recipes, and scientific research, which is often dumbed down so bad that instead of educating, it's spreading misinformation. Was it like this before, too, bro?
Not to mention the “funny” surveillance Reels of people minding their own business, maybe being a little too funky or drunk, and being filmed for content often without their consent. Fingers crossed that they won’t get doxxed, which is not frequently talked about in the Baltics because it’s shameful. No one wants random people discussing their digital footprint on Facebook or in some media outlet’s comment section.
I’m not getting turnt on social media anymore because it’s low-key offensive. The irony, too, is so borderline that I’m spooked. Next to the funny, products are being stuffed down my throat, for example, mouth tape, which I ordered in hopes of sleeping better (didn’t), or videos that get me mad at something stupid, like the sexual orientation reel I mentioned before, or plain ass misinformation that twists my nerve to the max. Who the fuck cares what people are not? obsessing over? Shouldn’t we be making content about how data centres—the same ones that power ChatGPT searches and endless possibilities—are exploiting our environment?
Girl, I know very well how all this sounds. Boohoo, the Internet is so bad 4 you, what are you, my mum? Like, for sure, there’s helpful content: unproblematic funny videos, recipes, book and film recommendations, life hacks, cool trans people, artists, musicians, etc. I get and like that, but this feeling of being an anon bully has started to trump the perks. Truly, what the frick, why am I frowning at a young girl questioning my interests, and why do I feel it’s fucked up that I’m consuming it?
It drives me insane, often by questioning people over who the content creator or the general population has power over, so I, the viewer, would engage with it. Straight alt-girls questioning The Gay Morale and trans people, men questioning women, boys questioning girls and everything that lies below girls like LGBTQ+ people, etc.
The ironic jokes aren’t that good and fresh either. Giggling over labubu dubai chocolate love island crumbl cookie grow a garden lululemon consumerism isn’t cool when you consider that labubus will soon be adding height to mountains of garbage in Africa, Latin America, or Asia. Of course I understand that I’m lmaoing over the ridiculousness of these trends I’m seeing. Still, it’s self-deprecating because I am allowing and confirming these extremely consumerist trends by laughing at these jokes and sharing them. This brings these harmful trends to our attention, adding to their popularity and normalisation. Call me a diva down, but like, that’s so not giving. Girl, Instagram is showing ME reels of street questionnaires where, based on MY algorithm, a white girl with cornrows asks a black girl if cornrows are racist. The black girl obviously answers yes, to which the white girl responds, “If you can wear a wig, which is white culture, why can't I wear cornrows?”. Like, even I am seeing these videos, although I’ve never been interested in street questionnaires, alt-right content, pranks or trolling. Imagine what the algorithm will feed a 6-year-old boy who just made an Instagram or TikTok account.
My siblings' son is 4 years old. Suppose the content he will be fed by social media in the upcoming years is not acknowledged and discussed. In that case, I’m pretty sure that he will soon begin to argue alt-right positions in a ‘jokey’ tone, asking the same questions as why black people could copy white culture, but white people can't copy black culture; or why The Gays can accuse me of being homophobic, but I can’t accuse them of being heterophobic (recently, he denied watching GIRL cartoons; like…).
Instead of explaining why wearing cornrows as a white girl can raise eyebrows, the goal of these big social media platforms is to irritate the viewer, which, based on the ideology of the content, will influence the viewer's worldview too. It’s polarising because I go nutty at how indecent this girl with cornrows is and the unaware person watching this video will get mad at the black girl who, rightfully so, also goes nuts at this white girl and won’t explain why it frustrates her because the goal of the content isn’t dialogue but is to stir DRAMA, which is captivating, but almost ALWAYS scraping coin off the minorities. It’s giving hate.
The younger the viewer, the easier they are to manipulate. Add to the mix that racial, gender, feminist and other social topics aren’t easy to understand when you’re not affected by them, and BOOM, young boys, come to daddy. Give them the “you’re a little pussy,” and they’re locked in, especially in this goofy ass age of male loneliness and girlbossing.
Male loneliness epidemic, girl, this needs unpacking… (who isn’t lonely). A straight guy's worst fear is being accused of rape, being a racist, homophobic, transphobic, privileged, A Man, or a woman, pede, pidars or pideras… I get that. Young men don’t know how to deal with being afraid and alone, asking for help is for the weak, plus, there aren’t many positive examples of masculinity. So boys and men feel lost.
Even in Tallinn, I don’t feel comfortable discussing my feelings with my straight guy friends. I remember that one of my guy-friends, who was my first close BRO when I was 18 or something, said to me, “I don’t really care about women, haha, I just fuck them,” to which I answered, “Don’t speak like this in front of me.” Thinking back, of course, he was aching since his ex didn’t want to be with him anymore or something, but saying “I use women” was the way he chose to express his pain.
Obviously, the reason why boys feel lonely isn’t women (or other femme people). “Fuck bitches, get money” is an appealing idea when you’re in middle or high school, some girl stood you up, and your feelings are hurt. You sense that you can’t discuss them with anyone because it could mar your masculinity.
A culture governed by, yes, I will use these words, patriarchy and capitalism, is what pressures men into being the breadwinners, to toughen up and to swallow their feelings and pain, at the same time making it almost impossible to earn a decent wage, to be content and caring. This is an illusion, which is being held and capitalised by mean and clever people who sell self-conscious young men ideas like, “it’s women’s (=femme people’s) fault you’re such a pussy”, also, “buy my course to get rich fast”. Instead of directing our attention to the heart of the problem, manfluencers distract us from the problem and profit from it.
King manfluencer Andrew Tate was and is really famous. He founded Hustler University, to which Estonian boys also attended. In 2025, in fact. The other guys keeping the manosphere alive are mostly online streamers. Instead of using woke and smart words, I’m going to describe a video that encapsulates perfectly how the manosphere operates.
There’s a video of this streamer, Sneako, meeting his underage fans to take a picture. I think they’re 12 or something. After taking the picture, the boys start jumping up and down, shouting “fuck the women”, to which Sneako responds, “What, no, we love women”. Then the boys ask, “But not like the transgenders, not the gays, right? ALL GAYS SHOULD DIE!” To which Sneako responds, “No, we love everyone,” followed by :o to the camera. These creators don’t understand the consequences of trolling, spreading extremist ideas that appeal to a young male audience to make a coin. They know that they’re getting rich doing it, so they don’t care.
A 2022 study among 15-year-old Estonians found that boys’ and girls’ attitudes towards gender roles are moving rapidly in opposite directions. Whilst Estonian girls share liberal views, Estonian boys are more aligned with conservative values. As we know, this polarisation is taking place worldwide. In a 2024 research paper, Kaarel Lott, Maria Murumaa-Mengel, and Raili Marling show that our local Estonian TikTok manfluencer scene is, atm relatively small, consisting of around 40 identified accounts in a country of 1.3 million people.¹
What’s interesting is that, unlike manosphere forums in other Eastern European countries, Estonian manfluencers do not build masculinity around religion, xenophobia, or anti-Western sentiment. This is most likely due to Estonia’s low religiosity and the manfluencers’ focus on cosmopolitanism and wealth. Namely,Estonian manfluencers emphasise societal decline and men’s grievances, placing blame on “woke society” and women. For them, “True manhood” is to be achieved through discipline, suffering and domination of women and other non-dominant gender identities.
Their content mirrors traditional and global manosphere ideologies. It adapts seamlessly to local contexts, though with minimum regard to local norms, making it universal and easily transferable across regions, greatly amplified by TikTok’s algorithm.
The paper concludes that this spread of gendered, divisive narratives poses risks to social cohesion and inadvertently supports Russia’s disinformation campaigns aimed at polarising Estonian society, highlighting the urgent need to address the global mainstreaming of such extremist content. How this could be done will be discussed later on.
In Latvia and Lithuania, no peer-reviewed research analogous to the Estonian studies has yet emerged. What is giving TEA, though, is that Latvia is the first of the Baltic states where a TikTok party has been elected to parliament, a BECID report states. Before the elections, their star, Glorija Grevcova, was an unemployed young woman with a high school diploma. Her videos had received millions of likes. Even though the number of TikTok users is relatively similar in all the Baltic states, in Latvia, the platform is used by populist politicians spreading Kremlin-friendly messages. It doesn’t play a role in politics in Estonia and Lithuania yet.²
What’s fuelling the disproportion between left and right digital media is that liberals have no real social clout on the internet. In contrast, the right, therefore the manosphere, but also now the femosphere, particularly “tradwife” influencers, has developed its system for decades. They’ve seeded their ideology through digital presence, and they have actual funding structures for right-wing content creators. The left lacks this because they don’t take “content creators” seriously and don’t think billionaires should exist. There is almost no well-structured digital media system for liberal messaging. No funding.
According to the Central Statistics Office's 2023 international trust survey, overall trust in news media is relatively low in the Baltic states, 38.2% in Estonia, 37% in Latvia, and just 24.8% in Lithuania. As a Gen Zer, I do trust our national broadcasting, but I know that they don’t cover topics that don’t align with our country’s politics. That’s the only local news source I read to stay in line with what’s going on in Estonia. For more interesting reads, I turn to Wired, for politics, to Ground News. I do get a lot from Instagram too, mostly via Them and random political news suggestions, which I usually fact-check.
What might turn that frown upside down is that media freedom and pluralism are stronger in the Baltic traditional media than in many other post-communist countries. All three countries have established relatively free and pluralistic media landscapes since independence, supported by strong public broadcasters, which play prominent roles in providing impartial news and promoting national identity.
On the other hand, the concentration of ownership and political interference does raise a few eyebrows. For example, Latvia's media market shows oligarch-style media ownership with the Dombrovskis family's control of several major media outlets. Ownership concentration is also prevalent in Lithuania with the partisan Lietuvos Rytas and Respublika media outlets, which span the spectrum of liberal and nationalist-conservative.
Estonia tends to have a more diversified media market, though centre-right leanings are noted in prominent newspapers like Postimees. That said, I would LOVE to get to read more about Palestine, Sudan or Congo, and what’s really going on in there, from Estonian media. Pwease…
Recently, I received a submission to write about the Estonian Song Festival, which I was and still am a little critical of (having a classical music back- and foreground, it’s impossible not to). The submission came from Postimees. The editor promised me a proper fee and travel compensation, but after sending them my article, they rejected it. The explanation was that in their opinion, I looked for, and I quote, “unimportant and negative topics, such as LGBT or sign language”, and of course, I based my “violent mistake-hunt” on my personal aversion to the festival. They did not pay me for my work, but happily, I got it published in another paper.
Smaller or digital platforms like Müürileht, Levila in Estonia, Trickster, adopt more liberal or progressive positions, appealing to younger or urban audiences. Parallelly, right-wing and nationalist voices have grown more prominent recently, partly linked to political movements in the region. In Estonia, Uued Uudised and Objektiiv, which also cite Ben Shapiro, for example.
Then again, young people get their news from social media, especially in smaller countries with limited access to diverse news sources. Couldn’t find any clear research findings, but I dare to assume based on my acquaintances. Since the digital media I consume, and I presume, other young people too, is mainly in English and based in the U.S., the UK, Germany, or some other big EU country, I primarily focus on global digital media that’s in English. This mainly consists of social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, X, among others, which are all based in the U.S., except for TikTok (China).
The right absolutely dominates digital media, a 2025 Media Matters report proves. And by A LOT. Nine of the top ten online shows are right-leaning, with a total following of more than 197 million subscribers and viewers across platforms. Right-leaning shows accounted for two-thirds of the total YouTube views on videos from channels affiliated with the shows they assessed, 65 billion views in total. Comparatively, left-leaning online shows totalled 31.5 billion total views.
These numbers are not an accident, Parker Molloy concludes on The Objective. “They’re the result of a deliberate, well-funded strategy to dominate the digital media landscape with conservative voices. While left-leaning creators struggle to cobble together sustainable business models through Patreon donations and merchandise sales, right-wing personalities are frequently backed by billionaire money that allows them to build sophisticated media operations with professional production values and massive marketing budgets.”
Take, for instance, The Daily Wire, co-founded by Ben Shapiro. Starting as a small conservative website, it is now a sprawling multimedia empire that generates films, children’s programming, and numerous high-performing podcasts.
This growth didn’t happen organically, but was bankrolled by Texas fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who reportedly invested 4.7 million dollars to get the company off the ground. The U.S. conservative donor class has systematically built and funded an alternative media ecosystem that now overshadows progressive digital media.
Why does progressive online media operate in a funding desert? It’s mainly because major progressive donors simply haven’t prioritised building a comparable media ecosystem, but directed their resources toward traditional political campaigns, issue advocacy, and established nonprofit journalism rather than investing in the creator economy. But anyone who’s online literally lives in the creator economy.
Although Gen Zers may already have some sort of belief system that protects them against bigoted ideas—I do, and my friends do too—what about your relative's kid who’s growing up in a conservative rural town? You’d assume they watch cartoons or The Assassin's Creed gameplay videos on Twitch or YouTube (or maybe I am the naive one). Well, think again, because even if they are, they are also being fed the worst shit that exists on social media, like Andrew Tate wannabes and hateful content about women. Social media CEO’s literally don’t give a willy about who is consuming what. They just want to maximise their profits. Boots. That’s boots, girl!
Take, for example, YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, and Facebook. These platforms shape content feeds to maximise engagement by promoting emotionally charged and controversial content, which is commonly far‑right and misogynistic. It irritates, gets your attention, and influences you. As before, social media platforms monitored hate speech, but now, Meta is also getting rid of fact-checkers, similar to Elon Musk’s X, and TikTok appointed an ex-Israeli soldier as new “Hate Speech” manager. This means that it’s now permitted to call gay people mentally ill on X and Meta apps. Other slurs, such as Blackface and Holocaust denial, are also prohibited. Additionally, Meta’s policies and practices have previously silenced voices supporting Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook.
The message of the right is often that it’s the too woke queer people, who are standing in the way of your dreams and society’s goals by accusing everyone of being racist, homophobic, or a rapist. As long as they keep these stories in the forefront, they have you thinking about this instead of that. And if it’s not gaining as much traction any more, they move on to the next thing that picks on our nerves and exploits the minorities.
It’s difficult to see that people are disproportionately being baited into outrage over something. We must understand that this baiting and outrage is making tech bros A LOT richer by the minute. Elon Musk, who owns X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Meta, are two of the wealthiest people on EARTH. Take that in, girl, because we’re kind of making them rich.
The wealthiest 1% globally now own almost HALF of all private assets in the world, according to Oxfam’s June 2025 report.³ This is “more than enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over,” according to an analysis from the anti-poverty group. We are warned that this imbalance poses long-term risks to political stability, global markets, and social cohesion, a reality that is already unfolding. Our politics are governed by tech bros, which I will discuss later on. PATIENCE.
Some time ago, a Delfi sports reporter accused Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, a cisgender woman, of being a man hitting a woman. BOOM, transphobia was broadcast across Estonian private media, and the clickbait was insane. I wrote to the Delfi reporter, asking him to fact-check his sources, adding that he’s spreading misinformation, and discriminating transgender people and women by doing so, to which he replied, “I'm an old-school guy, and I've been taught since childhood to respect women as the weaker sex, and the most blatant thing that can happen is for a man to hit a woman.” Why not ask an expert about something you don’t understand? At that moment, the transvestigation reached Estonian media.
In 2024, there was a report by Channel 4, which indicated that a mighty 52% of Gen Zers thought that “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader were in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” Meaning a dictator? And 33% agreed that the UK would be better off “if the army was in charge”.
Alison Philips writes in The Guardian, how almost three-quarters of 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK visited TikTok in May 2024, spending an average of 64 minutes a day on the site. Among those in their early to mid-teens, saturation is closer to 90%, and surveys show it is their single-favoured news source, meaning they get most, if not all, of their information from social media, particularly from TikTok. Imagine seeing our national broadcasting news on TikTok. Cinematic royalty-free music and yassified edits. I would DIE.
Instead of serving cunt, TikTok’s algorithm is serving up young men and boys an endless stream of content that’s promoting strength, “common sense”, traditional ideas around gender roles and incessant railing against wokeism. I’m dead. On the ground.
Of course, pushback from the right against “elite liberal dogma” and “political correctness gone mad” is as old as time, but what is different is how TikTok has turbocharged these ideas into the mainstream for young people, who, by and large, don’t really know shit about politics. “Blaming the media” is, too, the oldest cliché in the book, but to discuss the causes of the appeal of populism in young boys without putting it in the context of TikTok’s capacity for mind control is to discuss drug use and to ignore how addictive fentanyl is. So, “What's wrong with TikTok?” would be the next obvious question.
A UCL-led study, where researchers created archetypal male teenage TikTok accounts and logged over 1,000 “For You” page video recommendations over five days, found a fourfold increase in the level of misogynistic content in the “For You” page of TikTok accounts within just over five days. Interviews with school staff in the UK revealed this content began influencing real‑world school culture, with misogynistic ideas being normalised in peer interactions.
Wait. Do you remember when girls were being choked without consent during sexual encounters because boys think it’s what they want? It turned out, boys picked it up from porn and manosphere influencers like Tate, Sneako and others, who claimed that women are “biologically submissive” and that rough or violent sex is proof of masculinity and dominance. Social media algorithms amplified this trend, and don’t forget to add to the mix that there’s no proper sex education in schools, and there we were, girls are being pushed down on teen boy dick because “that’s what they’re into”. It’s almost always women and femme people who end up getting hurt because boys don’t know how to regulate their emotions. Or needs. Funny thing is that it’s usually women and femme people who end up helping these boys, too.
To put this into numbers, a Dublin City University Anti‑Bullying Centre study, where researchers set up 10 “sock-puppet” accounts on blank smartphones, configured as male teenage users, showed that masculinist, anti‑feminist content—including extremist or manosphere videos—was recommended to all male-identifying accounts within the first 23 minutes, regardless of prior viewing preferences. After approximately 2–3 hours (400 videos watched), the recommended feed consisted of 76% misogynistic/anti-feminist content on TikTok and 78% on YouTube Shorts. That’s like, a lot. The crowd goes wild, literally.
Netflix’s “Adolescence” portrayed pretty accurately how boys radicalise, although the series didn’t find me gasping. Too linear, black-and-white, depressing and superficial. I didn’t get any new information, and the music, yikes. Zeros across the board. But I do recommend it because it’s a rare depiction of a widely underrepresented topic.
So, TikTok and X steered the elections in Germany, and Facebook played a central and controversial role in the Brexit referendum. All through the tactics of feeding the working people extremist content that does well on social media, and what’s most important, slips good coin into the tech bro’s pocket.
Last year, and this year too, I think, TikTok and X amplified far-right party AfD content disproportionately, even to users who showed no interest in politics, by promoting its posts through their algorithms.
Investigators found that up to 78% of recommended political content on TikTok and 64% on X favoured the AfD, helping the party reach and influence younger voters. Girl, Elon Musk himself attended their massive conference.
It was so unbelievable because AfD frames itself as a voice of the people who’s against elite structures. And Elon Musk is… This made AfD second in polling nationally, and in the 2024 European Parliament elections, AfD saw a record-high youth vote share, with 21% of voters under 25 supporting them nationally and 16% in the EU Parliament.
Around 2016, Facebook enabled the microtargeting of voters with opaque political ads during the Brexit referendum, including content from campaigns that misused harvested personal data and spread disinformation. Meaning, Facebook amplified misleading content, facilitated illegal tactics, and played a critical role in shaping voter perception in the UK, especially in the final weeks before the vote.
Carole Cadwalladr, who reported on the situation in real time, gave a TED Talk about it and was later sued extensively, summed up what’s unfolding not just in the UK, but across the EU as well:
“This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. [...] This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.” Into a world where the rich tech bros are literally exploiting everyone under our very eyes. Back then, I didn’t know shit about it, but now, how do I fight back? Should I delete my social media accounts and protest on the streets?
I’m going to circle back. Shit’s scary, but the goal here isn’t to log off, to stop using the internet or social media. It’s actually the opposite.
Aidan Walker argued well in his essay that if you leave TikTok, Meta, or X, you can take action there to make change, like Bluesky, for example. Pay for a Patreon or Substack, become a mod or admin for a community you care about, seek out and support the posts you believe in, flag harmful content, boost good content for the algorithm, participate in the comments section when you usually wouldn’t, and troll the adversarial ecosystem of right-wing critics and influencers.
If you have any kind of platform, make yourself an instrument of the people who follow you, and measure your success by how well your posts represent your values and the values of your followers rather than the fake numbers these platforms spit at you.And we have to start discussing digital citizenship. Whatever the political structure for democratically mobilising the power of digital publics may be, it will involve fighting back because the internet is everyone’s, not only Musk’s or Zuckerberg’s.
Discussions of social media, children, and mental health invariably turn into debates about whether social media is good or bad for children. Or for people in general. This emerges when we centre the technology. But instead, we need to centre young people. What is at the root of their struggles? What do young people need and want to feel empowered? Let’s find out.
In Estonia and the Baltics in general, I assume, advertising is regulated to prevent unfair or harmful content from adorning our public space. The same should be done with social media, with broad restrictions protecting all users, not just children. Additionally, comprehensive privacy laws are absolutely essential to limit data collection and targeted advertising, ensuring users can opt out of invasive practices like biometric data use and data brokerage.
Current internet censorship legislation suffers from quite stinky rules that lead to excessive and arbitrary content removal, undermining free expression and disproportionately affecting marginalised groups. If anyone has noticed, many websites want you to prove you’re 18+ by scanning your face or asking you to upload your ID. Please don’t give the tech industry your biometrics or your ID information; they will be stored indefinitely and sold for even more profit. And so they can track almost EVERY move online and offline.
Maybe in the future, when we have proper laws and more responsible digital conduct, the internet will be less addictive, but more balanced, helpful and empowering.
Imagine, instead of clickbait, we would have headlines and thumbnails that focus on the solution. Instead of ironic consumerist memes, we would have petitions or digital gatherings that could actually do good. Instead of scrolling past the posts of the genocide happening under our noses and feeling hopeless, we would think that we have the power to put an end to this. Please write to your country officials to recognise Palestine as a state and to stop the import, export, and transit of weapons to and from Israel. This is something we can all do.
Living in an addictive digital world comes with the price of losing connection with the real world, which makes it easier to exploit because we care less and feel hopeless. We can’t seem to find resources even for those who lack access to food and water, let alone for other living species. But we seem to source them instantly to fuel and cool data centres, which in San Antonio guzzled 463 MILLION gallons of clean water, while locals are asked to take shorter showers.⁴
Currently, we are under the tech bros’ paw and feel helpless, hopeless. This is what they want us to feel so that they can capitalise. But without us, they wouldn’t have a cent, so let’s not forget that. The internet should serve and empower everyone, not only a few bigoted and sad men.
¹ Lott, K., Murumaa-Mengel, M., & Marling, R. (2025). Mainstreaming the manosphere: Discourses of contemporary masculinity among Estonian manfluencers. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12.
² Spriņģe, I., Meidutė, A., & Malts, K. (2023, February). Is TikTok a gateway to politics in the Baltics? For now, only in Latvia (D2.5, University of Tartu, Baltic Engagement Centre for Combating Information Disorders). BECID.
³ Oxfam International. (2025, June 25). New wealth of top 1% surges by over $33.9 trillion since 2015 – enough to end poverty 22 times over, as Oxfam warns global development “abysmally off track” ahead of crunch talks. [Press release].
⁴ Koithan, S. (2025, July 30). San Antonio data centers guzzled 463 million gallons of water as area faced drought. San Antonio Current.