Can Your Teen Hijack the Algorithm?
Swipe left on cruelty
The much-talked-about Netflix series Adolescence has run its course of public attention. However, I would like to take you back to this hard-hitting series, episode 2: the camera glides down the school corridor where Detective Bascombe, already overwhelmed, hands his son Jamie’s unlocked phone.
On the phone screen is Jamie’s last social media chat thread with the deceased girl Katie- an emoji code that the Detective needs an explanation for from his son.
“She’s calling him an incel, Dad. The whole class joined in.”
The camera cuts to a close-up of Jamie’s own hand later, scrolling those same messages alone in an empty classroom. It lingers on Jamie’s thumb hovering over the ❤️, trembling between reflex and resistance.
Cruelty now travels at instinct-speed- a reflex tap, a half-second grin, and the barb rockets into a hundred pockets. Courage, by contrast, still asks for one full inhale, that shaky moment when your stomach flips and your values jostle for your attention.
Why do algorithms turn cruel?
So, where, inside that transient pause, can kindness wedge itself, especially when the whole arena fits in the five-inch Gorilla glass of your (or your kid’s) prized phone?
That single wavering thumb poses the scientific riddle we tackle today:
Why does doing the right thing feel so hard the moment a phone screen appears, and how can one tiny line of text flip the script?
In other words, why do people, including our children, become cruel in the anonymity of digital media?
Darts inside the algorithm
In an earlier post, we explored the distinction between peer pressure and moral courage, hinting that platforms often reward the loudest provocateurs.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sharpens that idea with his “dart-gun” metaphor- likes and retweets are cheap to fire, painful to receive, and lethal for adolescent minds, like Jamie in the Adolescence series.
When ridicule dominates scrolling
In a 2022 US Senate testimony, Haidt warned that teens who scroll social media more than three hours a day are twice as likely to report depression or self-harm, with girls suffering most. When you scale that modest risk across millions of daily scrollers, you get a public health landslide catastrophe.
The social media feed’s damage is not only the darts we see, but also the kindness we don’t. Haidt’s earlier work on moral elevation- the warm feeling we experience when witnessing generosity- shows that it triggers oxytocin, calms the body, and inspires copycat kindness.
However, when ridicule dominates the timeline, those oxytocin-elevating sparks vanish, and stress-inducing cortisol begins to rule over the teenagers’ minds.
Algorithms reward mockery
A 2024 classroom experiment offers hope. Researchers embedded a social media co-pilot chatbot in teen group chats; whenever bullying flared, it whispered ready-made upstander lines, such as “Not cool- let’s chill.”
Armed with these scripts, students intervened more often and reported that one civil message made it easier for friends to join, with help rather than hate.
It is our misfortune that we are enslaved by algorithms that may reward mockery, and yet one visible line of chosen courage can still ignite moral elevation and flip the crowd.
Social media platforms clock your “thumb-stop ratio”- how long your thumb hovers before the swipe. When you stop swiping your thumb to the next reel for more than 5 seconds, that pause tells the algorithm that the reel is “engaging,” so it spreads the reel wider.
Platforms reward any response- laugh/ridicule emoji or kind reply alike- as pure engagement. Both the responses push the reel wider, but only one shapes what the scroller sees next.
Give your teen a ready script that cues courage to stop cruelty and bullying. The algorithm still logs their click as engagement, but the feed gets courage, not cruelty.
Our job is to hand our teenagers that line before the thumb wavers.
Robin Hood who kills the algorithm
In 2014, three friends in New Delhi slipped into bright-green T-shirts, collected a few trays of surplus naan, handed them to people sleeping under a flyover, snapped a selfie, and tagged it #BeRobinHood.
That single, visible act of chosen courage- tiny, unmistakable, public- sparked what is now the Robin Hood Army (RHA), a zero-fund, volunteer-run movement that rescues restaurant food and serves it on the streets of 13 countries.
Visibility remains the multiplier. RHA posts a monthly “Food Board”, a poster listing the number of meals every city chapter served. February 2025’s board shows 1,297,328 meals in 108 Indian cities.
Ten years on, those green shirts have served 160 million meals, and the RHA still insists it is “only 1 % done,” a tongue-in-cheek reminder that the scoreboard exists to recruit the next Robin.
The pattern is obvious:
One person chooses courage in public.
Onlookers feel a moral uplift- Jonathan Haidt calls it elevation- and copy it.
The act stays visible (shirt, fridge, food board), so the loop never closes.
When your teenager types “Not cool- let’s chill” in a roasting thread, they are raising the digital equivalent of that first green flag.
Dunbar’s village of 150 has become a group chat of thousands, but the physics of bravery haven’t changed - visibility still multiplies kindness faster than any algorithm built for mockery, if someone goes first.
Parents & the single-minded micro script
How do we, as parents, help our teenagers shrink the Robin Hood Army’s playbook to pocket-size cheat code- ready for the moment your child’s thumb hovers over an unkind laughing-emoji?
1. Practice the “hover breath”
At dinner, open a harmless meme from your social media feed.
Ask, “Would you tap like? Why? What would you lose, or gain, by pausing?”
That tiny inhale is the neural gap between reflex and chosen courage. Name it often enough, and the pause becomes muscle memory.
2. Pre-load a micro-script
Your child needs one ready-made line for that roasting thread:
“Not cool- let’s chill.”
Maybe your teen will write it on a sticky note, tape it to the mirror, or type it as a phone shortcut. Courage travels faster when the words are ready for a quick reminder and cut-copy-paste- so courage can fire before cruelty
3. Model grown-up green-flagging
Tell your child the last time you hesitated to speak up online. Then show what happened when you finally did (or didn’t). Adults who reveal their wobbles make courage feel learnable, not genetic.
Four practised words
These moves don’t inoculate kids against every social media feed storm. But they do something subtler and sturdier: they hand a teenager the digital equivalent of RHA’s first green T-shirt- one visible signal that kindness is active here, inviting the next person to join.
In a scroll that never sleeps, that invitation may be the most powerful thing a parent can teach.
Four practised words: “Not cool - let’s chill.”
That’s all it takes for a tween’s thumb-hover to tip the feed from mockery to courage, proving that kindness is still the sharpest tool in a pocket-sized world.
Remember, Raising kind isn’t always easy, but it’s always worth it. See you soon with the next issue of Raising Ki(n)d.
Gaurav G