How toxic digital spaces are grooming angry young men

It is past midnight in a cramped dormitory in Dhaka. A young university student is bathed in the cold blue glow of his smartphone. The city outside is quiet, but his screen is deafeningly loud. He is scrolling through his feed, isolated, carrying the invisible, crushing weight of economic anxiety and societal expectations. He isn't actively searching for extremism. He isn't looking for hate. He is simply looking for a sense of identity, a feeling of control, and a community that tells him he matters.

But the algorithm that curates his reality has other plans. When we discuss radicalisation and the growing anger of Bangladesh’s youth, we almost exclusively frame it as a theological failure or a political crisis. We look for underground sleeper cells, outlawed literature, and foreign funding. But the radicalisation of our young men is no longer just a sociopolitical issue. It is also a design problem. Toxic digital spaces are actively grooming a generation of lonely, anxious youth by weaponising their search for masculine identity to maximise platform engagement.

The digital public sphere in Bangladesh is not a neutral reflection of our society. It is overwhelmingly a young man's world. According to recent estimates, up to 62.9 percent of Facebook users in Bangladesh are male. They make up a massive audience scrolling through systems engineered by foreign corporations to harvest their attention and habits. The consequences of this digital architecture are often devastatingly real. A 2017 study by the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP), surveying 250 arrested on suspicion of extremism, revealed that 82 percent of them used social media, which is thought by police to have played a major role in their radicalisation. The survey also found that 56 percent of them had Bangla and English medium backgrounds, while 22 percent came from madrasas. However, another CCTC research, released in 2023, on 512 suspected extremists apprehended between 2016 and 2021, showed that only 19.5 percent of them were educated. But 74 percent of them received a general education, and 23 percent had a madrasa background.

Both surveys shatter the old stereotype about the relationship between educational background and far-right ideologies. The suspects were not predominantly students of rural madrasas, cut off from modern society. In fact, per the 2023 survey, 15 percent of the participants, who were educated, had a post-graduate degree. Like many young people today, they must have navigated the brutal, zero-sum competition of our education system and stared down the despair of youth unemployment. 

This raises the question: how does a university student go from watching entertainment to endorsing violence? Mainstream social media platforms act as the first point of contact. The recommendation algorithm is designed to maximise watch time. It quickly identifies that content featuring aggressive posturing and narratives of cultural victimhood generates the highest engagement from young men.

Once a user is hooked, the grooming moves from the public feed into the private shadows. Extremist recruiters, observing this engagement, migrate these vulnerable users to encrypted channels on apps like Telegram. There, away from the imperfect eyes of content moderators, the rhetoric shifts from generalised grievance to targeted radicalisation and operational coordination.

To understand this, we must look at the cold mechanics of the attention economy. Internet platforms such as Facebook are not necessarily designed with malice. They are designed for profit. Algorithms are amoral. They simply optimise for whatever keeps the user scrolling. And in the psychology of a young man under immense societal pressure, nothing catches attention quite like aggrieved indignation and a rigid, unyielding definition of masculinity that offers easy answers to complex failures. Hate speech, misogyny, and religious chauvinism are highly engaging. By rewarding this content with virality, the architecture of social media effectively funds and expands our communal polarisation.

This global design flaw collides disastrously with our local reality. Consider the immense, unspoken pressure we place on young men in Bangladesh. In our patriarchal society, they are expected to be the providers in a floundering economy. They face the soul-crushing bottleneck of the BCS exams and saturated corporate job markets. Yet, Dhaka offers them almost no physical places for releasing this pent-up frustration. There are very few accessible parks, community centres, or cultural hubs where they can congregate, express vulnerability, or fail without catastrophic judgment.

So, they retreat to the digital world. The smartphone becomes their primary arena for proving their worth. When a society denies its young men dignity and space in the physical world, it should not be surprised when they find a toxic, digital substitute that offers them the illusion of power.

If we accept that online extremism is a structural design failure rather than a sudden moral collapse, our solutions must fundamentally change. We must stop treating this purely as a policing issue. Arresting individuals under the cybersecurity law after a tragedy occurs is akin to mopping the floor while the faucet is still running. We are treating the symptom, not the disease.

We need a national pivot toward digital resilience. This means implementing algorithmic literacy and "prebunking" (psychological inoculation against misinformation tactics) into our national educational curriculum. We must teach our youth not just how to code the algorithm, but how to recognise when the algorithm is attempting to manipulate their emotions.

Furthermore, Bangladesh must join the Global South in demanding architectural accountability from tech giants. We know that design interventions work. When WhatsApp faced a crisis of mob lynchings in India, fuelled by digital rumours, they introduced "design friction" limiting the number of times a message could be forwarded and removing the quick-forward button. The velocity of misinformation plummeted. We must demand similar "design friction" that slows down the viral spread of outrage.

Let us return to the young man in Dhaka, bathed in the glow of his screen. He went online looking for a community in a world that makes him feel small. What he found was an algorithm that sold him outrage and called it strength. He is the future of our republic, yet his civic education is being outsourced to systems that value division over harmony. If we do not intervene with humane technology, the hatred confined to these screens will inevitably spill onto our streets. We cannot build a civilised society on code that only knows how to tear us apart.

Md Shihab Hossain is an undergraduate student of Computer Science and Engineering at North South University. He can be reached at helloshihab1512@gmail.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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