By Sören Henrich, Jeremiah Perez-Torres, Séan Looney, and Brigitte Naderer
At this year’s Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference, our goal was to hear from as many different voices in the field as possible as part of launching our project, “Crisis, Connectivity, and Meaning: Exploring Youth Extremism in the Digital Age”, funded by the Critical Applied Thinking Call, which fosters exchange with the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study (NETIAS).
Discussions moderated by the authors in the TASM breakout session centered on the following questions: how do we understand the current generation of young people in a rapidly shifting socio-digital landscape? And what does this mean for preventing harm, including pathways into extremism? During the sessions, conference participants painted a nuanced, sometimes contradictory, but ultimately coherent, picture of a generation grappling with fragmentation, uncertainty and an intense search for meaning in a world shaped by algorithms and crises.
What follows in this post, is a synthesis of those conversations, organized around three guiding questions: What characterizes the current generation? What environmental or systemic challenges shape their lives? And how should researchers, practitioners, and policymakers approach young people today?
A Generation Between Overload and Emptiness
Participants described a generation defined by simultaneous overload and absence. Surrounded by unprecedented volumes of information, youth experience a “high rate of information without distinction of importance,” intensified by algorithmically curated feeds. In effect, once something resonates, the system ensures there is “no end to the thing you deemed interesting.”
Concurrently, an erosion of meaning frameworks, where “all morals become equally meaningless,” contributes to a form of nihilistic drift. Yet this coexists with an active search for meaning, expressed through fragmented, personalized “micro-ideologies” shaped by short-form content, niche online “pocket cultures” like fandom spaces, and the disappearance of physical “third spaces.” When public figures model regressive, infantile behaviors, it further degrades adolescent perspectives, leaving few constructive models for civic engagement.
Youth also navigate a contradictory relationship to efficacy. While digital platforms reward visibility, beneath lies a sense of limited real-world influence shaped by structural inequalities and precarity. The result is a sharp tension between a belief in the need to act, on the one hand, and a profound uncertainty about whether action matters, on the other.
Structural Pressures and the “Reduction of the Village”
This fragmentation reflects deep-seated systemic pressures, chiefly the collapse of communal support. As families and local institutions grow strained, parents are left overwhelmed and young people have fewer resources to develop essential social-emotional skills. While smartphones are the most visible symptoms, simplistic device bans fail to address root environmental causes, leaving the internet as the primary environment for community building.
The traditional education system has similarly struggled to keep pace with a landscape where adolescent worldviews are heavily shaped online. To counter this, schools must transform into supportive spaces by broadening outcomes, equipping educators with practical interventions, and directly addressing factors fueling youth anxiety.
Overlaying these strains is a 24-hour news cycle dominated by compounding global crises, creating a “moral injury”: a persistent awareness of systemic suffering combined with a limited capacity to respond. This ambient macro-anxiety deepens their detachment, even when individuals do not explicitly articulate specific fears about their future.
Digital environments shift how connection and authority operate. The attention economy rewards instant gratification and visibility metrics, driving youth to invest heavily in online identities at the expense of traditional civic participation. Crucially, trust operates ambiguously: while young people exhibit widespread cynicism toward institutional authorities, trust in peer-to-peer dynamics remains intact. This horizontal trust creates fertile ground for both profound prosocial connection and peer-driven conspiratorial narratives, particularly in a “post-truth” environment where synthetic media blurs boundaries between fact and fiction.
Importantly, contributors cautioned against overgeneralization. We must distinguish between broader generational shifts and the specific mechanics of harmful or violent radicalization. Vulnerability remains fluid, situational, and unevenly distributed by gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic context. Maintaining this analytical nuance requires us to consistently question the generalizability of our assumptions.
Rethinking Ideology and Motivation
One of the more conceptually challenging discussions centered on the role of ideology. If traditional, structured belief systems are weakening, how do we understand contemporary forms of extremism or harmful mobilization?
Several participants argued that the analytical concept of ideology itself requires a fundamental update. Rather than adhering to coherent dogmas, contemporary mobilization increasingly relies on diffuse, modular, and highly personalized ideological fragments assembled through online consumption, complicating traditional efforts to categorize, predict, or “securitize” highly fluid phenomena.
Consequently, there was strong consensus that focusing solely on ideological text risks overlooking underlying psychological and environmental susceptibilities. Rather than starting with automated classifications of belief, practitioners and researchers must prioritize foundational questions: What are adolescents lacking? and What structural voids draw individuals in? Shifting the analytical lens from what young people believe to what they actively seek—belonging, recognition, stability, and agency—provides a far more productive baseline for understanding modern pathways to extremism.
Engaging Without Fixing
Across all discussion groups, there was strong consensus that top-down, restrictive models—such as blanket social media bans—fail to maintain authenticity and trust. Outright bans are easily bypassed and risk severely exacerbating the vulnerabilities of marginalized groups who rely heavily on digital networks for safe community building. Instead, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners must favor a collaborative, “give-and-take” relationship that replaces restrictions with tangible assets, such as physical third spaces. Rather than relying solely on screen-time limits, guardians must be supported in actively guiding youth to navigate digital spaces safely.
A foundational principle of this approach is co-design: embedding youth meaningfully into the development of interventions, legislation, and research through mechanisms like focus groups. However, participants acknowledged that balancing active trust-building with institutional safeguarding requirements remains an ongoing practical tension.
Effective intervention also requires re-centering communication and education. Adult stakeholders must explicitly demystify contemporary nihilism and engage youth in open dialogue without defaulting to judgment, pathologization, or punitive measures. This open communication must be paired with education focused on both critical digital literacy and social-emotional competencies like empathy. In this regard, the humanization of harm—for example, through the inclusion of victim voices—was highlighted as a way to build emotional connection. Rather than focusing solely on technical skills, digital literacy can be improved through empathetic redirect methods, inoculation strategies, and counter-messaging that explicitly account for youth’s intersecting lived realities, including gender dynamics and cultural context.
Finally, contributors stressed that trust cannot be built through one-off interventions. It requires sustained, localized engagement tailored to specific communities. This means actively involving families, understanding localized patterns of platform use, and recognizing that vulnerability and resilience are fluid dynamics that shift over time.
Conclusion: From Diagnosis to Possibility
The discussions at TASM 2026 suggest that the current generation is not defined by a single trait, but by a set of tensions: between connection and isolation, agency and constraint, abundance and emptiness, cynicism and hope.
For those working in preventing harm, including extremism, this means moving beyond narrow frameworks and embracing a more holistic understanding of the lived realities of young people. It requires grappling with structural conditions and underlying economic anxieties as much as individual behaviors, and recognizing that the search for meaning, however fragmented, remains a central driver.
If there is one thread that runs through all these conversations, it is this: young people are not disengaged; they are navigating a world that often fails to make sense. The challenge is not to impose meaning, but to create the conditions in which it can be found.
Acknowledgments: We are incredibly thankful for the thoughtful and valuable exchange we had with TASM attendees. The feedback provided to us will help shape our subsequent discussions with European institutions as we continue to develop our research on this topic. Future updates will be disseminated via the VOX-Pol blog.
Dr. Sören Henrich is a Lecturer, School of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Education, Manchester Metropolitan University’ Dr. Jeremiah Perez-Torres is an Assistant Professor of Crime and Justice Studies, Marist University; Dr. Seán Looney is a Lecturer in Criminology, University of Plymouth; and, Dr. Brigitte Naderer is an Assistant Professor, Medical University of Vienna.