Bigger Dangers than Strangers: Internet Safety in the 2020s

From the advent of home internet in the ‘90s to the comparative digital superage of the 2020s, web safety has been a top concern. Whether it’s understanding how to protect your personal information, setting social media accounts to private, or understanding the red flags of common email scams, we’ve long been teaching and learning the best ways to stay ‘safe’ online.

Of course, young people have always been a dominant presence on the internet. And wherever there are children, there are safety concerns. One of the biggest lessons for tech-aware youth has always been the ubiquitous concept of stranger danger—a concept borrowed from earlier decades’ paranoias about child abduction and other crimes, neatly applied to the World Wide Web. Stranger danger was and is a real concern, but the truth is, it’s never been the main problem, and that’s now more true than ever.

At the time of writing, it’s June, a time recognized by many as Internet Safety Month. As we’ll explore in this article, the public conception of the internet and its risks for young people has changed very little over the internet’s 30 years of existence. By looking at some of the most troubling realities of being online today, we’ll explain why internet safety in 2025 is about so much more than stranger danger.

Kids Online

Naturally, children have always been the focus of the internet safety discussion. Gen Zers, the first ‘digital native’ generation, were practically raised online, which meant there was no shortage of digital safety dogma surrounding kids and the internet. 

Our younger readers might remember their parents installing NetNanny or similar programs promising parental control over what the computer would show. Perhaps you had presenters visit your school to educate you on the risks of having a public social media account. The global attitude even extended outside of school and the home, with police-aligned TV programs like “To Catch a Predator” constantly stoking the anxieties of parents, convincing them that a dark, global cabal of sinister adults was constantly trawling the net for their next victim.

Let’s get one thing straight: Strangers were online looking for children to abuse and exploit, but not nearly as many as “To Catch a Predator” would have you believe (the vast majority of child abuse cases are committed by parents and guardians, not online psychos). And it’s true that this is still an issue today. But one thing that conversations on online safety tend to miss in 2025 is that these people look a lot less like whatever creep Chris Hanson is sat across from, and a lot more like Andrew Tate.

New Net, New Dangers

The internet as a whole has become far, far safer for kids over the years. As it becomes less of a free-for-all community bulletin board and more of a sanitized, corporate marketplace, there are fewer and fewer dark nooks and crannies for young people to fall into. 

Many of the seediest chat rooms and forums where dangerous adults could easily access impressionable, naive kids have vanished from the net. Automated content filters and user flagging tools are commonplace, often deleting dangerous or abusive content before a human ever even lays eyes on it. And of course, digital safety is no longer a foreign concept to the youth of today, many of whom have had an Instagram account since they were 9 and generally don’t need to be told to avoid giving out their address online.

But as the old threats of the internet’s Wild West days fall by the wayside, a new, subtler hazard has taken its place: Toxic masculinity among young men and boys, and the rise of a new generation of neo-conservative, radical right-wing youth. Despite clear signs that this digital danger is running amok through our children like a flu, much of the internet safety conversation is still stubbornly focused on the archaic concept of stranger danger, refusing to acknowledge the far more dangerous and ubiquitous issues at play. 

Misogyny, MAGA, and Meta

The internet of the old safety discussions was one of independently run forums, chat rooms, and webpages. The average user would visit dozens, if not hundreds, of sites a day, each with its own safety measures, policies, and moderation (or lack thereof). Today, the internet is more or less boiled down into a handful of behemoth platforms, most of which are social media platforms.

The vast majority of internet users are on social media apps like Instagram, X, and Facebook, as well as hybrid social media/content platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube. Kids and youth, who rack up 4-9 hours of screentime a day on average, are a huge portion of the user base for these platforms, which is why it’s vital that we take a closer look at them and the content they show.

As you probably know, apps like Instagram are ruled by complex, mysterious algorithms that provide personalized content suggestions for each user. Theoretically, the algorithm should begin as more or less a blank slate, becoming more attuned to the user’s preferences and interests as they use the app. But as investigations have shown, extreme, radical, and dangerous ideas and viewpoints are overrepresented in these algorithms, serving up hateful, prejudiced, or even violent content to kids online.

In a 2024 study in the journal PNAS Nexus, it was discovered that targeted social ads for extremist parties in a 2021 German election received far more impressions than more moderate candidates, despite spending the same amount on ads. Facebook is also known to show content that it believes will outrage you, as this tends to lead to more time spent on the app. A 2024 study by University College London and the University of Kent found that TikTok privileges extreme material in its For You Page recommendations, with a particularly worrying bias for misogynistic content couched in humour, irony, and ‘gameification’. 

For (most) left-leaning adults, we’re not going to become racists or misogynists because of a handful of TikToks or Reels. While we might come across this content on social media, most of us will simply swipe past it, and the algorithm will eventually settle into a more left-wing-oriented environment catering to our viewpoints (which is a nice way of saying ‘echo chamber’, but that’s a topic for another day). But for children, who don’t have enough life experience to have espoused right or left-wing views on much of anything, this is a far more worrying problem.

Andrew Tate: The Tip of the Iceberg

In the brilliant 2025 Netflix mini-series “Adolescence”, 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the brutal murder of a female classmate. Eventually it’s discovered that (spoiler!) he did in fact commit the heinous act after she refused his advances and called him an ‘incel’ on Instagram. 

Incel (a portmanteau of ‘involuntary celibate’) is a term used by and applied to angry, misogynistic men who blame women for their loneliness, limited social skills, and emotional illiteracy. What started as a semi-ironic descriptor of lonely men on the now-banned /r/incels subreddit has now become a worldwide movement, creating a tidal wave of misogyny and male entitlement spurred along by the likes of Andrew Tate, who is called out by name in “Adolescence” for possibly causing Jamie to view women as disposable objects who should either want him or die. 

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to Tate, the misogynist, ‘alpha-male’ influencer facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Britain, but suffice to say, he’s bad news. Whether it’s his views on women being the property of their husbands, blaming victims of sexual assault, or allegedly forming an organized crime group to traffic and exploit women, he is known by many as a disgusting stain on the metaphorical tablecloth of progressive society. Despite this, Tate enjoyed massive fame and success prior to charges being brought forth in 2023, thanks in large part to his online “academy” and “War Room”, where he targeted boys and young men to pay money for his courses in exchange for get-rich-quick schemes and incel-related, misogynist, ‘manosphere’ ideology. 

But Andrew Tate is only the very tip of a vile worm burrowed deep within the tissue of our digital culture. Wherever you look, right-wing dogma is insidiously popping up in digital spaces, and it’s probably not an accident. With X CEO Elon Musk closely tied to the Trump administration (not to mention Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s newfound support of the President), it’s not really a conspiracy theory to suggest that these tech giants probably have a vested interest in steering popular discourse towards the right. But even if we set the tinfoil hats aside, we can see the pendulum swinging. 

Conservatism as Counterculture

Whereas young people have generally been left-wing as a response to more widespread conservative ideals, more young men are turning towards the right as it steps up its digital campaign to sow the seeds of prejudice, misogyny, xenophobia, and hatred. For a time, it appeared as if the left had won on many key issues: Gay marriage was a given. Abortion was accessible. Gender affirming care was becoming more available. But as we’ve seen throughout history, there came a shift. 

For all of human history, youth have rebelled, defied norms, and created countercultures in relation to generation-defining principles. The Flower Power movement defied American imperialism in Vietnam. The Civil Rights movement fought back against racist segregation. The Climate Activism movement tried to rebel against corporate interests holding the planet hostage. But today, some of this defiant, youthful energy is being directed against the ‘status quo’ of leftist policy. 

Using the well-documented smokescreen of internet humour and irony to camouflage hatred, a new army of neo-conservative youth emerged, building strength in fetid digital colonies on 4chan, Reddit, and elsewhere, before being turned loose on our society at large. Today, we see this manifest in rising numbers of young men voting conservatively, a disturbing increase in violence against women, and an alive-and-well culture of young ‘alpha males’ who believe that women are subservient beings at best, and disposable sex objects at worst. 

All of this comes at a time when the left wing has arguably collapsed on a greater scale. Kamala Harris, the so-called ‘liberal’ candidate in the last US presidential election, supports corporate interests, police oppression, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza just as much as Trump, leaving many ideological liberals without a representative. Much of the left-wing discourse also focuses on policing one another’s language, thoughts, and perceived inactions through petty callouts and tepid infographics, splintering the cause rather than rallying together against the unified authoritarian right. 

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and hate in general aren’t just alive and well. They’re on the rise, fueled in large part by sinister online content designed to reach young, impressionable, white men who feel disenfranchised and powerless after a short lifetime of checking their privilege. All this under the ‘leadership’ of racist, misogynist men who make obscene comments and jokes about sexual assault, are found civilly liable for rape, and are former associates of sex traffickers, all while blaming the world’s problems on the latest ethnic scapegoat of choice. For the historically-minded, this might sound hauntingly familiar.

This is the danger of the internet today. Not shadowy predators, or anonymous creeps… (Even though those still exist and must be discussed), but brazen, unashamed social media influencers (and politicians acting like influencers) promising a brave new world for any man ‘courageous’ enough to manifest the destiny he is apparently entitled to.

Starting a New Conversation on Internet Safety

Learning about this topic is like cracking the lid on a Tupperware that’s been at the back of the fridge for weeks. You know you’ll find something bad. You take a peek. It’s worse than you imagined. Foul, smelly, threatening to grow legs and make a break for it. Do you throw the lid back on and wait for someone else to deal with it? Give up and toss the whole thing in the trash? Or do you take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and get to work?

This is the attitude that we must adopt when it comes to protecting kids online. It’s disturbing and disheartening to see the full extent of this poisonous mindset across social media and other platforms, constantly reinforced by the content algorithms that rule our digital lives. For kids, who are ready to absorb what they see far more readily than adults, it’s vital to learn modern skills to address these modern problems.

Digital literacy is something every parent and teacher should understand and impart to kids in their lives. Understanding news biases, misinformation, and the rise of potentially dangerous tech like AI deepfakes (more on those in a future article) is one of the most important parts of an internet safety education. At the same time, it’s vital that we continue to impart the values of kindness, tolerance, and acceptance to kids through offline experiences, helping to shape them into decent people who won’t be immediately derailed by the first angry woman-hater that comes across their feed.

We’ll admit it. The internet safety conversation is a far different beast than in Chris Hanson’s day. While the current state of the internet has provided an interconnected, sci-fi-esque world with near limitless opportunity, it also means we must bear the responsibility of protecting our most vulnerable from what we’ve created. 

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If you or a loved one is feeling unsafe online, particularly if the situation is involving a child, there is help out there. 

Cybertips.ca is a great resource for parents looking to help their kids learn more about online safety. You can find information about different kinds of cybercrime on the RCMP website, and if you or someone you know has been the victim of online crime of any kind, we strongly suggest contacting your local police office. 

For youth specifically, Kids Help Phone offers confidential 24/7 support through text, phone, and online chat.