• Minneapolis protests pattern: Recent Minneapolis protests are generating emotional responses similar to 2020, with saturated, performative, and reality-detached messaging across social media platforms.
• Social media broadcast: Instagram and similar platforms display extensive captions about trauma, declarations of unprecedented moments, and messaging that viewing passively constitutes moral failure.
• Widespread participation: Emotional excess extends beyond activists to lifestyle accounts, parenting feeds, wellness spaces, and commercial brands typically avoiding political discourse.
• Corporate statements: Companies including Whole30 and The Well-Trained Mind posted emotionally charged statements characterizing government actions as murder and terrorism on their business accounts.
• Parental emotional modeling: Parents teaching children about current events from infancy are modeling anxiety as moral engagement, causing children to absorb emotional overwhelm as virtue rather than regulation need.
• Medical validation: Healthcare professionals document patient symptoms including insomnia and physical stress from consuming Minneapolis news coverage, framing these responses as evidence of moral seriousness rather than disproportionate distress.
• Legislative consequences: Emotional messaging omits factual details about appropriations bills, with influencers urging defunding of ICE while overlooking that DHS funding discussions involve FEMA and Coast Guard allocations, contributing to government shutdown risk.
• Cyclical pattern: Similar emotional-over-analytical approaches occurred during COVID-19, Black Lives Matter era, Gaza conflict coverage, and gender ideology debates, with each cycle reinforcing conformity and preventing substantive reckonings.

News pouring out of Minneapolis these last few weeks is generating a strange sense of déjà vu.

Once again, protests in that midwestern city are saturating Americans with emotion — intense, performative and increasingly untethered from reality.

On social media, in particular, it feels like 2020 all over again.

Check out Instagram and you’ll see a rolling broadcast of distress: long captions about trauma, solemn declarations that this moment is unlike anything we’ve seen before and constant reminders that to look away is to fail.

Well-meaning people of all political persuasions, women above all, have succumbed to an irrational empathy that’s strangling any hope of reasoned debate on law enforcement and illegal immigration.

It’s not just a few overheated activists or fringe influencers: Lifestyle accounts, parenting feeds, wellness spaces, and for-profit brands that normally stay well away from political discourse are caught up in the emotional excess. 

“It’s OK if meal planning feels hard today,” went a post this week from Whole30, a company that offers guidance on elimination diets. “We just watched our government brutally murder a man in the streets.”

“Surely a great nation can enforce its immigration laws without terrorizing the innocent [and] without playing with racial hatred like a child with a lit match,”  the homeschool curriculum The Well-Trained Mind ranted on its Instagram account.

These statements, and countless more like them, are serving as emotional cues — making it clear that any response short of outrage is a moral failing.

The goal isn’t persuasion, but manipulation.

Among very-online parents, emotional dysregulation is increasingly framed as virtue.

Mom blogger Nina Caviggiola  wrote that she’s been teaching her children “about immigration, displaced people, minorities, people of color . . . since they were babies.”

“Children, especially ages 3–5, feel what’s happening in the world,” she warned. “They notice shifts. They sense fear, tension, injustice.”

Nonsense. Children don’t feel the news; they feel their parents.

When Mom or Dad models anxiety as moral engagement, kids absorb the message that emotional overwhelm isn’t something to regulate — it’s something to embrace. 

Professional validation of this spiral is deepening the problem.

Physician Lucy McBride writes about how her patients, unable to stop watching “the violence unfold in Minneapolis,” are suffering insomnia, tension headaches, racing hearts, skipped medications, and collapsing routines — all due to their “collective trauma.”

But she makes no suggestion that their distress might be disproportionate or unhealthy; she presents their symptoms as evidence of moral seriousness.

Emotional collapse isn’t a problem to address, in McBride’s telling, but proof that you care.

On her “Relatable” podcast, author Allie Beth Stuckey warned that America’s women are being trained to “feel their way through politics.”

Emotion replaces analysis. Anxiety is mistaken for activism.

The strongest feelings are assumed to be the truest ones.

Once this emotional groundwork is laid, political actors enters the picture, often with misleading messages.

So it’s no surprise that progressive influencers are increasingly urging followers to contact their representatives and demand they “defund ICE” by stripping funds for the Department of Homeland Security from a must-pass appropriations bill.

Ignorantly or intentionally, these posts omit the fact that the annual DHS funding bill under discussion doesn’t touch the locked-in budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but instead risks the $64 billion allocation for agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard.

But the legislative facts matter not at all when emotional urgency is at stake — and thanks in part to the groundswell, a Democrat-driven government shutdown is once again in play.

Feel first. React loudly. Ask questions later.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2020, when COVID-19 emerged, fear rapidly replaced reason and dissent became socially unacceptable.

The Black Lives Matter era overlapped with the pandemic, as slogans overwhelmed scrutiny and institutions competed to signal their virtue.

The conflict in Gaza has been judged largely through social-media feelings about warfare and the plight of suffering Palestinians, rather than sober analysis.

And the moral absolutism surrounding gender ideology has brought relentless language policing as even private hesitation was cast as harm.

Each episode reinforced the same lesson: restraint is suspect, nuance is dangerous, and emotional conformity is rewarded.

Yet once the emotional peak of each new crisis passes, there is no reckoning — just a pivot to the next one.

Declaring oneself traumatized by secondhand exposure to information one has chosen to consume on repeat is nothing but moral cosplay.

Real strength isn’t found in broadcasting despair. It’s found in resisting the pressure to join in.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.

• School Model: Alpha School operates private and charter campuses across multiple US cities with no traditional teachers, two-hour daily academic instruction via AI-powered tablets, and four hours of "life skill workshops"
• Tuition and Cost: Annual tuition ranges from $10,000 to $65,000 depending on location, with approximately 25% of students receiving scholarships funded through tuition and donor contributions
• Academic Structure: Students complete individualized learning plans through AI algorithms that adapt to each child's pace, with "guides" (non-certified staff paid ~$150,000 annually) providing motivation rather than direct instruction
• Learning Outcomes Claimed: Alpha reports students learn twice as fast and score in the top 1%-2% on MAP testing for reading and math growth, though state standardized test scores have not been publicly shared
• Support System: When students struggle (claimed to occur in less than 5% of cases), academic coaches from TimeBack (mostly located outside the US) conduct remote calls; guides provide 30 minutes weekly one-on-one time per student
• Physical Environment: Students work in flexible spaces including bean bags, long tables, and individual enclosed "pods"; the school uses a Pomodoro Method (25-minute work/5-15-minute break cycles) for the two-hour academic block
• Leadership and Backing: Co-founder MacKenzie Price partners with billionaire Joe Liemandt (worth $6.6 billion); the school has received attention from Education Secretary Linda McMahon and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman
• Expansion and Controversy: Alpha operates approximately 15 schools nationwide with additional planned openings; concerns raised by educators and health professionals regarding screen time effects on mental health and the absence of traditional teacher-student relationships

A private school that’s opening campuses from New York to California uses AI bots to teach kids their academic subjects in just two hours a day – claiming its Silicon Valley methods could shake up the future of US education.

Alpha School – a chain of private and charter schools founded in Austin, Texas in 2014 – opened its campus in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District last fall. In California, it opened schools last summer in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Lake Forest in Orange County. There are no teachers, no homework – and tuition can run a stiff $65,000 a year.

Inside, students spend just two hours a day learning language, math, science and other key subjects like history – clicking through lessons on tablets and laptops with the help of human “guides” that roam classrooms. The rest of the day is devoted to “life skill workshops,” which can mean climbing 40-foot rock walls, assembling a piece of IKEA furniture or solving a Rubik’s Cube.

12

Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price speaks during a roundtable event at Alpha’s Austin campus in September. Getty Images for Alpha School

The company is led by MacKenzie Price – a 49-year-old, Stanford-educated entrepreneur who regularly churns out videos to her 1 million Instagram followers, claiming Alpha can teach students twice as fast as conventional schools.

Price speaks the language of disruption, warning that traditional schools have “poisoned” young minds. Alpha staffers, she says, strive to instill a “growth mindset” – a hustle-culture phrase often used by tech bros – as they encourage kids to set their own goals and challenges.

“Teachers aren’t going to be replaced, they’re going to be transformed, and it’s such an exciting time for them,” Price told The Post in an interview.

Some critics are wary of Alpha’s placement of screens at the center of its daily program versus conventional teachers, questioning whether it amounts to a high-tech experiment that could put kids’ mental health at risk.

Doctors and psychologists warn that overuse of technology can have damaging effects on young kids – and make teens more likely to suffer from social anxiety, low self-esteem and depression.

“I believe it’s dangerous to wipe teachers from classrooms,” said Joe Vercellino, a Detroit Teacher of the Year and founder of The Lion Heart Experience, which brings mental health programming to schools. “What I worry about is what it will take away from our human development.”

12

Billionaire Bill Ackman encouraged his nearly two million followers on X to look into Alpha School. JASON SZENES/ NY POST

Price – who last summer schmoozed with billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman at a Hamptons event and has appeared on LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s podcast – leans heavily into tech startup culture.

In a recent Instagram post, she wrote: “Report cards are basically useless at this point. Instead, we put students in charge of their own accountability process.”

“I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time to be a 5-year-old than there is right now,” Price told The Post.

On her Instagram account, a 10-year-old Alpha student boasts he is a successful Airbnb manager, while a teenage girl announces she has founded her own app. 

Alpha is quickly growing. Its new Financial District campus opened its doors in September, just weeks after its three California campuses. There are about a dozen additional sister schools in cities like Miami, Austin, Texas; Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

In August, Ackman encouraged his nearly two million followers on X to contact Price about enrollment, calling it a “truly breakthrough innovation.”

12

Education Secretary Linda McMahon meets with students at Alpha’s school in Austin, Texas. Getty Images for Alpha School

Price and a rep for Ackman declined to comment on whether Ackman has a child enrolled at Alpha. Price said he is not an investor in Alpha and has not discussed plans to invest.

Alpha’s Austin, Texas, campus got a visit in September from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who hailed the innovative use of AI and argued it “will be critical to … preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce.”

At Alpha schools, students can work anywhere in the building, lounging in bean bags or sitting together at long tables.

Peeks inside Alpha’s campuses also have sparked alarms – including a video on Price’s Instagram last May that showed middle-school-aged boys curled up with laptops inside a row of cramped, phone booth-like enclosures the school calls “pods”.

“We started putting these boys in pods for 2 hours every day at school,” a caption on Price’s Instagram reads.

12

Some young boys at Alpha are shown curled up in tight, glass phone booths in a video on Price’s Instagram. @futureof_education/Instagram

Social media users were aghast, with one calling the images “terrifying,” saying Alpha appeared to be “isolating the students in a freaking pod while having them intersect with an AI.”

“This is almost inhuman, even if it’s for two hours a day,” the user added.

Alpha told The Post it is up to students where they want to work, and some prefer the pods because they are quieter with fewer distractions.

The school claims its K-12 students learn twice as fast at its schools and score in the top 1% to 2% on MAP testing, a nationwide measure of growth in reading and math. The school hasn’t shared student scores on state standardized tests.

12

Workshops often include physical activities. @futureof_education/Instagram

Alpha said its AI algorithm enables students to succeed with highly individualized learning plans. An app spits out a unique series of questions, which they need to answer correctly to “graduate” to the next grade – meaning kids can learn at different paces in the same classroom.

“Our apps allow us to say, ‘OK, Susie actually needs to go back to second-grade math,'” said Tasha Arnold, 43, head of Alpha’s New York City school and a longtime public school teacher.

Students who get questions wrong more than three times are prompted to review past lessons or watch a video on the topic. But they can’t raise their hand to ask the teacher, since there isn’t one.

Instead, Alpha employs “guides” – many of whom have no professional training in education, instead coming from careers as sports coaches or tech founders – and pays them salaries of roughly $150,000.

“I’m not there to try to teach them fractions or capitals. I’m there to help them find ways to find answers themselves,” Liam Stanton, 34, an Alpha guide who taught at international schools in China and Colombia for a decade, told The Post.

12

Billionaire Joe Liemandt joined Alpha School as a business partner and principal. YouTube / Invest Like The Best

The guides are placed in classrooms to help motivate students – but they’re not there to help with specific questions about academic material. Asked what happens when a child is truly struggling, Arnold said that’s when an “academic expert in that topic will jump on a call with you.”

Alpha claimed this happens in less than 5% of cases. When it does, guides will set up a call with a “scholar” at TimeBack – Alpha’s software development arm, which employs education experts and programmers who work on its “2 Hour Learning” model.

A list of the 31 Alpha scholars provided for the 2023-24 school year included at least 27 who live outside the US, from the Philippines to Colombia, according to Wired. 

Alpha declined to comment on this list, though it said 21 of its current 31 academic coaches live outside the US.

Price has grown Alpha School with the backing of Joe Liemandt – a Stanford dropout worth $6.6 billion, according to Forbes. After enrolling his own kids at Price’s school, Liemandt joined the staff as a principal and brought on his company, Trilogy Software, to help develop Alpha’s AI-driven curriculum. Alpha has since pivoted to its own development team at TimeBack.

“We’ve been able to develop this school, my partner and I, have been able to do this so far on our own,” Price told The Post when asked about Alpha’s funding, referring to Liemandt.

12

Nine Alpha students spoke at a Ted Talk event last May. Alpha School

While AI-driven efficiency may have some advantages, removing the in-person, human element from the core of the process could have consequences, Vercellino warned. An important part of school, he argued, is learning to ask for help from teachers – even ones you might not like – and scooting your chair over to help a fellow student with a problem. 

“As I often tell families, education is not a race to condense, it’s a journey filled with relationships, self-discovery,” said Kirsten Horton, an education consultant in Raleigh, North Carolina, where an Alpha school is slated to open this fall.

“For tuition of $40,000–$75,000 a year, families should expect not just efficiency, but the richness of a full ecosystem: drama departments, sports teams, counselors and a web of human relationships that guide children into adulthood,” Horton told The Post.

“Our program is really focused on what is best for children,” Arnold said in response to such concerns. “It’s not about what’s best for teachers or teacher’s unions, it’s not about what makes parents necessarily feel nostalgic about the way they learned.”

12

Alpha students playing pool, as seen in an Instagram video. @futureof_education/Instagram

Alpha says its guides spend at least 30 minutes of one-on-one time with each kid weekly, helping them set personal goals or discussing troubles in their personal lives. Guides are also required to pass an FBI-level background check and score 90% or higher on the CCAT, a pre-employment test that measures problem-solving abilities. 

“Unlike in the traditional teaching industry, where teachers are leaving the field in droves and they’re struggling to find high-quality candidates, we’re not having this problem,” Price said.

Despite warnings from health professionals, laptop and screen use has continued to soar in schools across America, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.

US students in grades one through 12 now spend an average of 98 minutes a day on school-issued devices during the school year – reaching a peak at two hours and 24 minutes daily in sixth grade, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

12

Alpha claims that its students learn twice as fast and score in the top 1% to 2% on MAP testing. Alpha School

Alpha pointed to this statistic repeatedly as proof that its two hours of daily screen time isn’t so outlandish. 

“Our students actually get more time to connect with their peers as well as their teachers than students in a traditional school environment do,” Price told The Post.

But traditional schools spend an additional five or six hours on academics from a human teacher – while Alpha students squeeze their academic studies, like reading novels and completing math lessons, into that daily two-hour blast on tablets.

They follow a time-management system known as the Pomodoro Method: studying on the apps for 25 minutes to earn a 5-minute break, then another 25 minutes for a 15-minute break, and so on until they hit two hours.

Wade Driscoll, 19, now a student at Parsons School of Design, graduated from Alpha’s Austin campus and said his classmates used the full two hours of learning time most days.

12

McMahon argued AI “will be critical to…preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce.” Getty Images for Alpha School

“A lot of times I found that [we] would get really into the subject and work and work through that five-minute break,” Driscoll told The Post.

Alpha students learn language, math and science on the AI apps. Other subjects that would typically require a standalone class, like history, are folded into the reading program. Alpha said this is because the standard history curriculum takes less time to teach.

It also personalizes reading material. If a third grader is reading at an eighth-grade level, they’re “still reading about unicorns, but it’s complex vocab. If they’re fifth grade but need a lower level, it’s still age appropriate,” Arnold told The Post.

The AI algorithm can also plug in information to make material more interesting for students, so they can learn math via the sales of Taylor Swift’s latest album instead of baseball stats, for example.

12

Alpha is quickly growing – adding its New York City campus this year to about 15 sister schools. Alpha School

When asked whether students ever read off real pages, Alpha said its kindergarten and first-grade classrooms are full of bookshelves and physical books, but they’re not part of academic requirements. 

Its unusual tactics have drawn attention online, including a currency the school has developed for rewarding high test scores it calls “Alphas.” Each Alpha is worth about a quarter, but it appears they quickly stack up – redeemable for arcade-like prizes including stuffed animals or a Nintendo Switch.

This “2 Hour Learning” model is also used at the company’s other non-Alpha schools, including some virtual charter schools and NextGen Academy, a private middle school in Austin with a curriculum that includes video games like Fortnite and Rocket League.

12

About four hours of the day at Alpha are spent on “life skill workshops.” Alpha School

Alpha markets itself as an alternative school for kids who struggle in traditional environments, whether they’re far more advanced than their peers or struggling to keep up.

About 25% of students across the Alpha system are on scholarships, which are funded through a combination of tuition dollars from other families and donors, the school said. While a family in Brownsville, Texas, might pay $500 a year and have the rest of the $10,000 tuition bill covered, the New York school is not yet offering aid for its $65,000 tuition.

Driscoll, the Alpha alum, said he switched to the AI school after unsuccessfully trying new school after new school.

“In public school, I felt really held back by the other students,” he told The Post. “I used to, like, tell my mom every day that I was feeling sick.”

But once he started at Alpha, “there was an immediate shift,” said Erin Driscoll, 51, Wade’s mom. 

“All of a sudden he had something to work for. He could be as challenged as he needed to be.”

• Imperial power shift: End of Maduro's rule in Venezuela and U.S. threats to Iran indicate entry into a new imperial age centered on data and artificial intelligence rather than armies alone.
• AI sovereignty definition: True sovereignty means ability to design, train, operate, secure and deploy foundational AI systems for national defense without external permission or dependence.
• Globalization reversal: After 35 years favoring efficiency and free flow of capital and talent, early 2020s saw pandemic and geopolitical pressures shift focus to security and localization.
• Simultaneous deglobalization and hyperconnection: World is simultaneously reversing globalization while space-based networks and data continue moving across borders unrestricted.
• Concentration of AI control: Since 2022 ChatGPT release, frontier AI adoption spread to billions of users but underlying system control concentrated in few U.S. firms with China as only rival ecosystem.
• Three requirements for AI sovereignty: Elite AI competence (scarce talent pool), energy at scale (power-intensive infrastructure), and financial depth (sustained investment without near-term returns).
• Limited sovereignty achievers: Only U.S. and China possess all three requirements at necessary scale and under sovereign control; other nations either lack some requirements or have talent serving foreign corporate interests.
• Trust as fourth constraint: Nations must trust foreign AI systems embedded in military, intelligence and cyber programs, making autonomy an additional requirement for true AI sovereignty.

By

Tom Tugendhat

and

Christopher Ahlberg

Jan. 29, 2026 3:35 pm ET

Martin Kozlowski

The end of Nicolás Maduro’s rule in Venezuela along with U.S. threats to Iran shows we are in a new imperial age. This time, it isn’t only about armies, it’s about data. Artificial intelligence is revising our concepts of sovereignty and power, adding an important realm in which two nations dominate: the U.S. and China. The story is still being written, but power is concentrating in these two poles.

Sovereignty here doesn’t mean access to powerful tools or building applications on top of them. It means the ability to design, train, operate, secure and deploy foundational AI systems capable of highly advanced functions in national defense and other sensitive areas of the state without external permission or dependence. By that definition, the field already looks far narrower than most policy debates assume.

Look how the global environment has changed. For roughly 35 years after the Cold War, globalization favored efficiency. Supply chains linked across continents. Manufacturing migrated to lower costs. Capital and talent flowed freely. States accepted dependence in exchange for market access. The internet connected markets, narratives and politics.

That era began to unwind in the early 2020s. The pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains, borders closed, and governments rediscovered sovereignty under pressure. What began as diversification hardened into localization. Migration slowed across the U.S. and Europe. Security displaced efficiency as the organizing principle of economic policy.

Geopolitics followed. China accelerated its bid for primacy. Russia chose war and severed itself from Europe. Across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, integration gave way to rivalry, and dependence became a liability.

Yet even as globalization reversed, connectivity didn’t. Space-based networks extended internet access. Data, content and influence continued to move across borders. The result is a world that is simultaneously deglobalizing and hyperconnected. In this strange new environment, modern AI emerged.

As frontier models, the technology capable of large-scale problem-solving, became widely available starting in 2022 as ChatGPT, adoption occurred at an unprecedented pace. Within months, billions of people had access to these powerful cognitive tools. Control over the underlying systems, however, concentrated into the hands of a few firms in the U.S., with China as the only rival ecosystem.

This concentration reflects three hard requirements of AI sovereignty.

First, elite competence. Not mass digital literacy, but a very small pool of people capable of building, training and operating large-scale frontier AI models. This talent is scarce, globally mobile and increasingly clustered.

Second, energy at scale. AI is power-intensive. Training and operating frontier models requires vast quantities of reliable electricity. This is a physical constraint, not a regulatory one.

Third, financial depth. Frontier AI demands sustained investment over long time horizons, often without near-term returns. Only systems with extraordinary amounts of capital can absorb that cost.

At present, only the U.S. and China appear to have all three at the necessary scale and under sovereign control.

A few countries have some of what AI sovereignty requires. The Gulf states have capital and energy but lack elite AI competence. The U.K. has exceptional talent but lacks energy scale and sufficient financial depth, as shown by the sale of DeepMind to Google in 2014.

Britain can claim DeepMind as a national success, proof that British universities and culture can produce world-class AI talent. But that talent now serves U.S. strategic priorities, operates under U.S. corporate governance, and would be subject to U.S. export controls in a crisis. The building is in King’s Cross. The sovereignty is in Mountain View.

Continental Europe should possess all three requirements but has struggled to retain its best people, many of whom now work for American-owned firms. Russia is perhaps in the worst position: It has energy, but elite competence and capital are fleeing.

There is also a fourth, less-discussed constraint. AI isn’t merely built; it must be trusted. As AI becomes embedded in the military, intelligence and cyber programs of the state, dependence on foreign systems becomes harder to justify. So autonomy is yet another requirement of AI sovereignty.

For countries outside the U.S. and China, this doesn’t mean the race is over, but it is narrowing. Some will align closely with one of the leaders. Others will seek partnerships to secure influence at the margins. Few will be able to sustain the fiction of full independence.

AI sovereignty isn’t a prize many nations can win. The strategic task then is to determine how to retain agency when technological power is concentrating rather than dispersing.

Mr. Tugendhat, a Conservative, is a member of the British Parliament and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. Mr. Ahlberg is CEO of Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company.

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• Platform and content preferences: Boys more frequently use video games and YouTube daily, while girls predominantly use Instagram and TikTok daily, with divergent influencer and content selections across platforms.
• Content category differences: Girls seek interior design, fashion, shopping, and animal content; boys pursue gaming and fitness content, following different influencers aligned with these interests.
• Algorithm influence: Customized feeds driven by algorithms reinforce existing preferences, creating separate digital environments where users receive similar content from comparable sources.
• Entertainment versus inspiration: Boys primarily seek entertainment on social media, while girls tend to follow role models and people they aspire to emulate.
• Political attitude divergence: Research indicates growing differences in political preferences between young women and men, with young boys favoring the Progress Party while young women show increased concern for climate and gender equality.
• Shared information sources: Girls and boys obtain news and facts from entirely different sources, potentially resulting in disagreement on factual matters and shared reality.
• Democracy concerns: Researchers express concerns that digital separation and divergent information sources could threaten democratic processes requiring shared understanding of reality.
• In-person meeting patterns: Despite digital divergence, young people report meeting through school, leisure activities, parties, and Snapchat, with some indicating adequate cross-gender contact.

Girls and boys are becoming increasingly different.

The differences in what they spend their time on and what they think are growing.

This worries the researchers.

How can young women and men meet when they live in such completely different worlds?

They seek out different kinds of content

“We don't really like to talk about gender differences in our society. But there's little doubt that there are differences between boys and girls on the internet,” says Halla Bjørk Holmarsdottir, a professor at OsloMet.

There are more young men and boys who play video games. And there are more young women and girls who use social media exclusively. A larger proportion of boys use YouTube daily, and a larger proportion of girls use Instagram and TikTok daily.

But the differences don't stop there.

On social media, they also follow different influencers, TikTokers, media outlets, and brands.

“The differences are more about what kind of content girls and boys seek out than about them spending time on different platforms,” says Marika Lüders, a media researcher at the University of Oslo.

Like to follow relevant people

“I think maybe boys follow more fitness influencers. Like football and that kind of stuff. And that girls follow influencers who are interested in beauty,” says Ida Amundsen Bjørkli.

She and her friend Filippa Owesen study sports at Ringerike Upper Secondary School and are both 17.

“The boys probably follow Norwegian TikToker Oskar Westerlin and that crowd. Many more boys do that than girls,” says Bjørkli.

Owesen and Bjørkli follow young Norwegian influencers like Tale Torp Torjussen, Leah Behn, Julie Fiala, and Trygve Bennetsen.

“We like to follow relevant people,” she says.

Both Tale Torjussen and Trygve Bennetsen are taking part in this year's Skal vi danse?, a Norwegian TV show based on Strictly Come Dancing. The girls get updates about the show and also follow them on social media.

“The fact that girls and boys follow different influencers doesn’t mean that we don’t meet up with each other. It’s more about having different interests,” says Owesen.

![Two young women in winter coats talking outside on a snowy street.](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2609850.webp?imageId=2609850&x=0.00&y=0.00&cropw=100.00&croph=100.00&width=960&height=720&format=jpg "Filippa Owesen (on the right) and Ida Amundsen Bjørkli are studying sports at Ringerike Upper Secondary School.")

Filippa Owesen (on the right) and Ida Amundsen Bjørkli are studying sports at Ringerike Upper Secondary School.

(Photo: Marte Dæhlen)

The feed is important

Marika Lüders and colleagues at the University of Oslo have been studying teenagers in an ongoing research project. Young people participating in the project say that they customise their own feed according to what they are interested in and what their preferences are.

They want a specific type of content and they know how to get it.

“The algorithms are a challenge,” says Holmarsdottir.

If they follow certain influencers, they also get tips and news from similar influencers with the same attitudes, whether it's about politics, beauty products, or money.

“Young people know that algorithms are in control,” the researcher says.

But it is possible to override them. Holmarsdottir suggests following people or media outlets you usually disagree with to make your feed more balanced.

“But young people probably don't do that. They follow the ones they follow, “says Holmarsdottir.

Not looking for goals or meaning on social media

“I don't think boys are necessarily looking for meaning or have any goals when they're on social media. I'm there to be entertained,” says Mads Nicolay Moe-Gaukstad.

He is 17 and attends Fyrstikkalleen School in Oslo.

He believes that girls tend to follow their role models and people they look up to more.

For Kasper Aleksander Oftedal, it's all quite simple: 

“I basically follow everyone who posts funny videos,” he says.

He follows a total of 4,517 users on TikTok.

![Four male students in winter coats standing outside on the snow between brick buildings.](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2609853.webp?imageId=2609853&x=0.00&y=15.66&cropw=99.87&croph=84.34&width=960&height=606&format=jpg "From left to right: Kasper Aleksander Melbye Oftedal, Leon Andreas Killerud Aiello, Mads Nicolay Moe-Gaukstad, and Storm Myklebyst all attend Fyrstikkalleen school.")

From left to right: Kasper Aleksander Melbye Oftedal, Leon Andreas Killerud Aiello, Mads Nicolay Moe-Gaukstad, and Storm Myklebyst all attend Fyrstikkalleen school.

(Photo: Marte Dæhlen)

Follows Tottenham football players

Several of the boys have accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and X. But not on Facebook.

“I only have Facebook to keep in touch with my family,” says Oftedal.

Leon Andreas Killerud Aiello uses X to get football news. But that's all he does there.

“I follow all the Tottenham players and all the Norwegian players,” he says.

Don't spend much time with girls

Boys and girls meet primarily at school, they say. Sometimes at parties.

“I don't really socialise with girls that much, other than family and my girlfriend,” says Moe-Gaukstad.

"Why not?" 

“I don't know. It just happens naturally. Every time I start at a new school, I've had more chemistry with the boys. It’s basically been sort of separate,” he says.

Storm Myklebust, on the other hand, believes that his group of friends is now quite mixed and that they hang out with both boys and girls. At least to a certain extent.

“But there are more boys, of course,” he says.

Controlled by algorithms

Myklebust thinks it's the algorithms that are in control, and that girls and boys end up somewhat distanced because of that.

“Before, there used to be just one channel everyone followed, and so we all had the same points of reference. Now everyone ends up in different places,” he says.

"Do you watch the evening news?"

“Yes!” the boys say in unison.

Moe-Gaukstad watches the evening news because he recently deleted TikTok. And Myklebust streams it every day. 

![Four male students in winter clothing stand in the snow looking at their phones.](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2609873.webp?imageId=2609873&x=0.00&y=4.53&cropw=100.00&croph=89.58&width=960&height=644&format=jpg "“I follow everyone who’s posted a good video,” says Kasper Oftedal (on the left).")

“I follow everyone who’s posted a good video,” says Kasper Oftedal (on the left).

(Photo: Marte Dæhlen)

The most popular YouTubers, TikTokers, influencers, and gamers

There are patterns as to which topics are most popular among girls and boys, says Lüders.

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In her survey of adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19, she observes that more girls than boys seek out content about interior design, inspiration, fashion, shopping, and animals. And that more boys than girls seek out gaming content. Slightly more boys than girls watch fitness content.

The same is shown by the Norwegian Media Authority's 2024 survey, in which researchers also asked which profiles and influencers are popular.

Isabel Raad and Oskar Westerlin

Boys spent the most time on MrSavage, MrBeast, Oskar Westerlin, and Gutta, while girls followed Julie Fiala, Leah Behn, and Isabel Raad.

The Norwegian Media Authority points out that there is great variation in adolescents' responses and that relatively few people identify the same profiles.

Lüders points out that some profiles are popular for everyone, such as the YouTube creators Sidemen, Beta Squad, and MrBeast.

“These YouTubers create content within categories that are popular across genders,” says Lüders.

The fact that girls and boys follow different influencers also means that they get news and facts from completely different sources.

This worries social scientist Johannes Bergh.

![](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2584042.webp?imageId=2584042&x=30.70&y=8.96&cropw=44.20&croph=61.24&width=960&height=760&format=jpg "Marika Lüders is a professor at the University of Oslo's Department of Media Studies.")

Marika Lüders is a professor at the University of Oslo's Department of Media Studies.

(Photo: University of Oslo)

![](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2132654.webp?imageId=2132654&x=14.74&y=3.99&cropw=79.61&croph=95.20&width=960&height=768&format=jpg "Johannes Bergh is an election researcher at the Institute of Social Research.")

Johannes Bergh is an election researcher at the Institute of Social Research.

(Photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen / NTB)

Receive different news

“The differences in digital media use are happening at the same time that disparities in political attitudes among young women and men are growing,” he says. "So how do they even meet at all?"

Bergh has studied the 2025 general election and whom young people actually voted for. Preliminary findings show that they differ from each other more than before.

For example, the Progress Party (FrP) is the dominant party among young boys, while young women overall have become more progressive and are concerned about climate and gender equality, according to Bergh.

No longer agree on the facts

The researchers are trying to understand the potential consequences of girls and boys living in such different digital worlds.

“The political consequences may be that gender differences in attitudes and voting behaviour continue to grow,” says Bergh.

This could lead to the serious outcome that people no longer agree on the facts – what is true and what is false.

“Such disagreement could potentially be a problem for democracy, which depends on some degree of shared understanding of reality,” says Bergh.

Must get them to meet

Holmarsdottir also believes that we as a people and society are moving towards a more polarised debate.

“We could lose a shared arena for discussing issues, which is a danger to democracy,” she says.

The professor believes we must try to create places where young women and men can meet in person.

“We really just have to ask young people. What do they want? Where would they prefer to meet?” she says.

![](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2584044.webp?imageId=2584044&x=14.98&y=9.22&cropw=83.36&croph=83.78&width=960&height=644&format=jpg "Halla Bjørk Holmarsdottir is a professor at OsloMet.")

Halla Bjørk Holmarsdottir is a professor at OsloMet.

(Photo: Sonja Balci)

Even though they spend a lot of time online, they need to meet in real life, she believes.

“That's why we should work to preserve physical spaces, such as youth centres, libraries, places where students can meet and have discussions,” she says.

Meet quite often

Ida Bjørkli and Filippa Owesen are not worried that boys and girls no longer meet.

When asked where they hang out together, they answer school, leisure activities, and at parties.

“And Snapchat. Snapchat is pretty universal,” says Bjørkli.

“So you don't miss having contact with boys?” 

“No, it's fine” Owesen answers. “We meet quite often.”

———

Translated by Ingrid P. Nuse

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

![](https://image.sciencenorway.no/2402921.webp?imageId=2402921&x=10.60&y=21.20&cropw=76.00&croph=55.65&width=568&height=280&format=jpg)

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• Task Automation vs. Job Elimination: AI typically reorganizes work by automating specific tasks within jobs rather than eliminating entire positions, contrary to widespread political predictions of mass unemployment.
• Misinterpreted Data: Goldman Sachs' estimate that 300 million jobs are "exposed" to AI describes task susceptibility, not job loss forecasts, yet policymakers treat it as an unemployment prediction.
• Historical Pattern: Technology lowers task costs, firms reorganize production, workers specialize in higher-value activities, and demand expands in ways task-based rankings cannot predict.
• Paralegal Example: Automating document review reorganizes paralegal work toward anomaly detection and client management rather than eliminating the profession.
• Professional Adaptations: Accountants moved to advisory roles, nurses to patient care focus, and developers to complex systems as routine tasks automated, with rising wage demand.
• New Job Creation: AI reorganization creates roles invisible to task-based rankings, including litigation-support managers, AI-review specialists, data assurance roles, and clinical operations leaders.
• Counterproductive Policy: Broad federal retraining initiatives assume occupational collapse rather than within-job adaptation, potentially pulling workers from productive roles and signaling panic that slows productive reorganization.
• Targeted Approach Needed: Rather than blanket retraining, policy should recognize that AI rewards workers with judgment and domain knowledge while penalizing those in rigidly designed roles.

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BPC > Full article text fetched from (no need to report issue for external site): | archive.today | archive.ph

Dan Page

Washington is bracing for an artificial-intelligence employment shock that is unlikely to arrive—and so the government risks spending billions of dollars preparing for the wrong problem. Panicked politicians are making the error of treating task-based occupational rankings—which estimate what share of various jobs’ tasks AI could perform—as unemployment forecasts. History suggests the opposite approach: AI is likely to increase the productivity and wages of many of these roles long before it eliminates them. Task automation typically reorganizes work well before it destroys jobs, if it does the latter at all. This misunderstanding is pushing policy in the wrong direction.

Headlines, policy briefs, and congressional hearings treat Goldman Sachs’ widely cited 2023 estimate that roughly 300 million jobs worldwide are “exposed” to generative AI as a prediction that AI will eliminate many of those jobs. The Goldman Sachs figure is derived from occupational-task lists and asks whether an AI system could perform some portion of employees’ current tasks—summarizing documents, drafting routine text, coding standard functions or analyzing familiar datasets. Many politicians and commentators assume that if AI can perform some of a job’s tasks, the role will disappear.

But the distinction between task repricing—when technology can take over all or part of a task—and job destruction isn’t semantic, it is economic. When technology lowers the cost of performing specific tasks by lifting some of the load, firms reorganize production. Workers specialize differently. Demand expands in ways that task-based rankings don’t capture.

Consider how this plays out in practice. A paralegal whose job includes summarizing depositions, reviewing contracts, and organizing discovery may score as highly “exposed” in a task-based ranking. But automating first-pass document review doesn’t eliminate the paralegal’s job. It reorganizes it. Work shifts from routine document-scanning to higher-value work such as flagging anomalies and managing client interactions.

The same pattern appears across professions. In accounting, software has automated large portions of bookkeeping and tax preparation without eliminating accountants, who have moved up the value chain toward advisory, forensic and judgment-intensive work. In nursing, AI tools increasingly handle documentation and monitoring alerts, freeing clinicians to spend more time on patient care rather than replacing them.

The logic of the Goldman Sachs estimate is similar to that underlying academic studies tracing back to the Frey-Osborne framework, which classifies occupations by susceptibility to computerization. It’s the same method behind the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2023 Employment Outlook, which reports that roughly one-quarter of jobs across advanced economies are highly exposed to AI-driven automation—another report that has raised political alarm. These studies’ approaches have a common structure: They map technologies onto tasks rather than onto labor-market outcomes. When repurposed as forecasts of displacement, they are asked to do something for which they were never designed. That is why both the OECD and Goldman Sachs explicitly caution in their reports that measures of AI “exposure” describe task susceptibility, not forecasts of job loss.

A job that scores as 40% “exposed” to AI in these rankings doesn’t have a 40% chance of vanishing. It is more likely to be reorganized. Technology automates, accelerates or reduces the cost of specific tasks within a job, allowing employees to spend more time on higher-value activities. As a result, output expands and wages often rise. Software developers, for instance, routinely use AI tools to generate boilerplate code, test functions and debug routines—tasks that once consumed hours. The result isn’t fewer developers, but developers producing more-complex systems faster, with demand for experienced talent rising rather than falling.

As technology accelerates tasks and reduces costs, companies also create roles that task-based rankings like those from Goldman Sachs and the OECD cannot see. Law firms increasingly rely on litigation-support managers and AI-review specialists who oversee automated document analysis rather than review the papers manually. Accounting firms have expanded their roles in data assurance, model oversight, and advisory services, which sit alongside automated reporting. In software teams, engineers now specialize in system architecture, model integration, and quality control—roles that expand as routine coding becomes automated. In healthcare, AI-assisted documentation has increased demand for employees who can lead clinical operations by managing data flows, compliance, and workflow design. These jobs exist because of how AI reorganizes work.

Policymakers’ misunderstanding jeopardizes those gains. Washington is racing to fund broad AI retraining initiatives on the premise that mass white-collar layoffs are imminent. Federal workforce initiatives, including AI-focused retraining grants layered onto existing programs such as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, increasingly assume occupational collapse rather than within-job adaptation. But if AI primarily augments tasks rather than replaces jobs, this approach misses the mark. Workers don’t need to be rescued from their professions; they need room to adapt within them.

This is where retraining could help—but only if it is targeted. While AI won’t destroy occupations in the manner politicians imagine, some workers will adapt more easily than others. AI rewards those with judgment, domain knowledge and machine output; it penalizes those in rigidly designed jobs, such as narrowly scripted clerical or call-center work. Blanket retraining schemes don’t account for these nuances.

Large-scale retraining programs have a mixed record, even when displacement is real. When displacement is overstated, such programs risk doing harm. They pull workers out of productive roles, subsidize credentials with little demonstrated labor-market value, and signal panic to firms and households alike. That panic can become self-reinforcing: companies delay hiring, workers delay investment in firm-specific skills, and productivity-enhancing reorganization slows. The result is a policy-induced drag on growth and adaptation.

AI will disrupt labor markets, but disruption isn’t synonymous with destruction. The danger isn’t that AI will eliminate work faster than society can adapt. It is that governments will intervene where they shouldn’t and neglect where they should help. In preparing for an employment shock that won’t come, Washington risks wasting billions of dollars only to slow the adaptation that makes technological change a boon for jobs.

Mr. Lewarne is a professor of economics and finance at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

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• [PURGE-INVESTIGATION]: The Chinese Communist Party has initiated investigations against two senior military officials, including General Zhang Youxia, a high-ranking Politburo member and Central Military Commission vice chairman.
• [SENSITIVE-ALLEGATIONS]: Charges against General Zhang include corruption involving family members and the unauthorized disclosure of nuclear secrets to the United States.
• [POLITICAL-IMPACT]: Official Chinese military media describes the conduct of the accused as a direct threat to the Party’s absolute leadership and its foundational ruling authority.
• [INTERNAL-INSTABILITY]: The targeted removal of high-level figures suggests underlying factional divisions and potential internal opposition to Xi Jinping’s leadership within the military hierarchy.
• [SYSTEMIC-OPACITY]: The absence of transparent self-corrective mechanisms in the Chinese state requires officials to maintain public displays of absolute fidelity regardless of policy outcomes.
• [POLICY-CONSEQUENCES]: Centralized state mandates, such as the one-child policy and real-estate regulations, have resulted in demographic crises and significant economic loss for the population without avenues for accountability.
• [GOVERNANCE-COMPARISON]: While democratic systems experience public unrest and legislative conflict, autocratic structures face risks from the isolation of absolute power and the suppression of civil dissent.
• [HISTORICAL-PRECEDENT]: Long-term competition between liberal societies and autocratic technocracies often shows that absolute power eventually degrades a society's capacity and leads to authoritarian decadence.

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Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews Gen. Jack Keane. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images/Ali Khaligh/ZUMA Press

In 1757, a firing squad executed Adm. John Byng on the deck of a Royal Navy warship for “failing to do his utmost” in pursuing the enemy during a battle in the Seven Years’ War. As Voltaire put it, they shot one admiral “to encourage the others.”

By that standard, military officers across China should be highly encouraged following Saturday’s announcement that the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party had opened an investigation of two senior military officials. As waves of purges took down one senior figure after another in the People’s Liberation Army, Gen. Zhang Youxia had seemed untouchable. Handpicked by Xi Jinping, Gen. Zhang was a member of the Politburo and as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission was second only to Mr. Xi in the military hierarchy. At a Saturday briefing for high ranking military officers first reported by the Journal, Gen. Zhang was accused of everything from conniving at corruption with family members to spilling nuclear secrets to the U.S.

Shocking as this news was, the commentary was even more ominous. As translated by the indispensable China-watcher Bill Bishop in his Sinocism newsletter, an editorial in PLA Daily, the army’s newspaper, said that the two suspects had “seriously fueled political and corruption issues that affect the Party’s absolute leadership over the military and endanger the Party’s ruling foundation. . . . They have caused immense damage to the military’s political construction, political ecology, and combat capability construction, and have had an extremely vile influence on the Party, the state, and the military.”

The implication is that, in addition to engaging in nefarious financial shenanigans, one of Mr. Xi’s most trusted henchmen was plotting against him. Had a military coup been nipped in the bud? Was a group that tirelessly portrays itself as firmly united around China’s supreme leader actually riven by faction and division? Did high-level officials with far more information than the average citizen harbor concerns about where Mr. Xi is leading the country?

Whispers and doubts will be circulating all over Beijing and at every level of party and army leadership, checked only by the paranoia of officials fearing for their careers and lives. Flattery and lies will proliferate in every official document and meeting as authorities strive to demonstrate their fidelity to the wisdom crystallized in the immortal texts of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.

At a time when the unpredictability of the U.S. president, the incompetence of many Western leaders, and the political unrest and social conflict in many democratic societies raise doubts about the sustainability and effectiveness of liberal political institutions, the Chinese purges are a healthy reminder that other forms of government aren’t without drawbacks. When President Trump threatens to invade Greenland, Republican senators can talk about impeachment. When poorly trained, badly led immigration agents under hotheaded officials fail to handle protesters in appropriate ways, the whole country knows what happened and the Oval Office cannot mute the resulting clamor.

In systems like China’s, healthy self-corrective measures cannot function. The worse the party mishandles key situations, the more loudly and unanimously officials and the media must praise its leaders. Almost every family in China is blighted by the ruinous and inhuman one-child policy, which brought a demographic crisis down on the whole country. Yet nobody could oppose the policy when it was in force. Nobody can now demand accountability from the cruel and misguided leaders who imposed it. Scores of millions of families have seen their life savings trashed by an utterly predictable real-estate bust brought on by decades of misguided central government policy—abetted by corrupt local officials and powerful interests. Nobody can say anything about that either.

Modern history can be seen as a series of contests between liberal societies and autocratic technocracies. From the wars between the highly organized French state under Louis XIV and Britain under William and Mary up through the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S., liberal societies have faced challengers who trusted in the power of a supreme leader unfettered by the restraints of liberal society and civil dissent.

In the short to medium term, the techno-autocracies often did well. Louis XIV, Napoleon, imperial Germany, Hitler, Tojo and Stalin all had some good years. But time and again the poisonous isolation that absolute power imposes on its wielders blunted the edge of their insight and degraded the capacity of their societies.

The question haunting China today isn’t whether Zhang Youxia sold military secrets to the U.S. It is whether the Chinese Communist Party is falling prey to the authoritarian decadence that brought so many of its predecessors to ruin and defeat.

Gen. Zhang Youxia, center, in Qingdao, China, on April 22, 2024. wang zhao/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images