Teenager pleads guilty to planning terrorist bombing targeting Opera House and Sydney marathon

I read an article by the Movember crew talking about algorithms and young men/teenagers. The bit that really stood out to me was the insidiousness of the algorithms. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like:

'Extreme content is seeded into their feed among games and sports and regular stuff. They don't start out seeking this stuff, the algorithm brings it to them.

So a 14 year old kid saw this stuff on tiktok and started going down that path himself. I guess we should be grateful that 14 year olds are not subtle and clever. He'd have probably been flagged by Google for searching for dodgy stuff from his home IP.

He said his justification for planning the attack was contained in a written message that said: “the country I am living in helped America evade [sic] Iraq and Afghanistan and killed many Muslims”.

From the article