Can You Be "Digitally Molested"?

thought digest, 08.14.2024

Our book club will be meeting on 8/18. The remote conversation will take place at 11am CT/12pm ET over Discord. Invite links below the cut.

A phrase that's been recurring in my Internet usage interviews is “digital molestation.” (S/o to Jan E. Stanek, who published a short story about this topic titled “A Computer That Molests You.”) 

While “digital molestation” carries slightly different meanings for different people, it generally refers to exposure to developmentally inappropriate material online. This includes pornography and sexually explicit chats, but people also mention violence and gore. Sometimes this content comes through a third party, such as a precocious (and, in at least one case, abused) classmate or older sibling. But kids often encounter it themselves either by curiosity or by accident. For example, in Case Study #2, James described falling down a rabbit hole of pornography while searching for what he termed "accurate" Flash games.

What's most concerning in these conversations is not just how common these experiences are but the frequency with which interviewees say, "My parents tried to protect me and couldn't." The line of communication was open. There was no instability in the home. 

This seems to stem from the fact that for the tail end of Very Online Gen Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers, computers, and smartphones have become like private parts of their bodies. Even those without something to hide view their devices as extensions of themselves. They’re territorial – don’t touch my phone! – not because they’re carrying on a secret affair or their Photos app is filled to the brim with nudes. It’s because when someone touches their phone or their laptop, it, too, feels like a sort of molestation. In my view, your machine is the externalization of your imagination, a concept becoming increasingly relevant with AI. (I explore this further in an upcoming article for The Washington Examiner.) 

The more I investigate Internet usage patterns, the more I'm confronted with a disturbing thought: Perhaps surveillance is necessary, and perhaps unrestricted free speech is naïve. I don’t like that I think this way. But the thought has crossed my mind, completely sincerely, more than once. 

Some people have an internal voice that tells them, “I know this exists, but I don’t want to see it.” That seems to be a privilege. Not everyone has that, just like not everyone has a “discipline muscle” that can get them to stick to a diet or do their homework, or put their phone down for more than 45 minutes a day. And it’s not “bad parenting” that causes it, either. 

Sometimes I wonder if the Internet was a mistake. People tell me all sorts of disturbing things about stuff they’ve viewed, both accidentally and otherwise, and often quite young. While this content was potentially accessible when I was in middle school, too – I may one day share a bullying incident involving a terrifying video of a German shepherd – it would be disingenuous to say that it hasn’t become more ubiquitous. It’s not that it’s “looking for people,” it’s that people have more time and privacy to look for it and so they do. 

"Digital molestation" also manifests in more direct forms, too. 

Sextortion, the practice of extorting money or sexual favors from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity, is slowly but surely entering mainstream discourse, as PSAs warning against it litter YouTube and TikTok. The concept of "grooming" is not only a talking point for engagement-focused right-wingers like LibsofTikTok, who could find sexual abuse in a sidewalk crack. 

However, we've yet to fully grasp how deeply the "grooming" discourse affects younger people.

Grooming exists, you don’t need me to tell you that.

It happens in classrooms, churches, apartment buildings, and soccer teams, too.  Online, it happens in spaces that feel unwatched: Discord servers, obscure corners of social media platforms, direct messages, and Telegram channels, to name just a few. While these trends aren't new–Millennials will know what I mean when I say Yahoo! Messenger or kik– it has become increasingly easy for children and teens to hide these interactions from their parents.

If I could text strangers from Neopets on my Nokia in 2007, it should go without saying what possibilities the smartphone opens up. 

Grooming impacts young people in a few ways. Many of them become victims. Some of them become streetwise, like one young woman shared with me in an interview this week: “i lost my nievity [sic] about men which in a world full of pedophiles and rapists i think is a great benefit.” And some of those streetwise–or maybe I should say jaded, instead–kids, both girls and boys, find homes in extremes.

For young women, it might be radical feminism, and for young men, it might be the far-right. Recently, I spoke to a man in his early 20s who told me that he identified as a “Hitlerist” because of his disgust with what he believed was widespread pedophilia, that was not only tolerated by the mainstream but openly encouraged. Friends of his, he claimed, had been groomed.

For girls, bad experiences might be further buttressed by premature exposure to content for and by men, like the Bukowski-esque autofiction of writers like Delicious Tacos and Red Pill messaging from people like Andrew Tate. For boys, the reverse is true: candid depictions of sex from confessional essays, Reddit posts, and TikToks for and by women, that make sense in a particular context, give the impression that dating is a hellscape and most women are misandrists.

The other way both real and imagined grooming impacts young people is a bit more difficult to write about. And that’s a macabre curiosity about it.

On some websites, there is a long and very aestheticized tradition of young women discussing their desire for much older men. (Because of the nature of this content and the people posting it, I will withhold tags and labels until I find a responsible way to write about it.) The Hitlerist I spoke to, on the other hand, claimed that on X and Instagram, there was a subculture of teenagers who wanted to be groomed, and said so explicitly in their bios. I didn’t believe him—it sounds like one of these things people make up to validate their own participation in moral panics—until I entered a self-described “toxic” fandom community and saw examples of it myself. 

One of the strangest expressions of this I’ve seen is self-styled “groomer” micro-celebrities, usually teenagers themselves. What does it mean if a 16-year-old boy has a popular Telegram channel where he calls himself a groomer to hundreds of age-appropriate adoring fans?

It’s at least partially rebellion. It has to be, right?

Despite claims that today's teenagers and young adults are no longer rebellious and that teen angst is recent of microblogging sites like Tumblr, the reality is more complex. As adolescence has become a better defined marketing demographic, teen angst has been effectively commercialized.

The interplay between the commercialization of adolescence, the Wild West of the Internet, and the ongoing Culture Wars has been disastrous. We see more and more extreme containers for self-expression. And we often double-down on that self-expression, too. We’ve accelerated just how seriously teen angst. Rather than recognizing that while these feelings are real they’re not always justified, we take them at face value. That’s better business: the customer is always right.

I say accelerated because if you look at media from the early 90s, these wheels were already turning. I’m a broken record here, but the Internet’s role in it can be traced back as early as newsgroups, and then forums, until finally we reach emo kids on LiveJournal and MySpace. Emo kids weren’t the first group to experience this, but they were certainly an important flashpoint in the Teen Angst Apocalypse that we’re currently living through. 

Another contentious issue is adults supplying young people with substances like hormones, Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Adderall. This is a tactic, and kids know it. It’s considered creepy even among young people, and a backlash against it, along with other sexually inappropriate behaviors, isn’t just brewing. We’re in the thick of it.  

And frankly? Good. Everything I’ve just described is horrifying. While I don’t agree with vilifying any specific population of people, I do think something’s gotta give. 

A reader asked about my thoughts on the MrBeast situation, which prompted this newsletter. For those unaware, YouTuber and media mogul MrBeast has been caught in a wave of controversy recently. First, Ava Kris Tyson, a former collaborator on MrBeast's channel, left following allegations of grooming. Shortly after, a former employee accused MrBeast of knowingly hiring a registered sex offender, referred to as "Delaware," to work on his channel. Since, people have come out of the woodwork to claim that he fosters a toxic work environment. 

Is this a #MeToo moment for influencers, as my reader put it? In a way, yes—I believe we're witnessing a backlash against what can be broadly termed "digital molestation.”

In MrBeast’s case, there’s a lot going on. He’s extremely rich and successful. That attracts opportunists. It’s not implausible he’s a pain in the ass or even abusive to work for, either, that’s the nature of his level of success. But I do think there’s something else going on, too. 

Take, for example, the wider acceptance that Keffals isn’t a paragon of innocence or the negative responses to purposefully sexually provocative influencers like TikTok’s Lillytino.

The silver lining to all of this is that I think Internet culture will become safer for young people. But first, it’ll get a lot worse. 

I'll be releasing several relevant interviews over the coming months. I'm spacing out these releases for a simple reason: even I have a limit, and a lot of these conversations have deeply disturbed me. I don’t like hearing about some of this stuff. It makes me hate the Internet.

But if I can help people, I’m happy to continue to do this work.

Now for some lighter fare: your questions.