Bard College Alumnus Dale Beran ’04 Interviewed on CNN about Online Radicalization

Dale Beran ’04, Bard alumnus and lecturer at Morgan State University, appeared for an interview on CNN, where he spoke about the online radicalization of young men and discussed how certain online communities form, such as the spaces on Discord and other platforms where highly classified US documents were first leaked by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old air national guardsman. “The larger set of Discords that these leaks appeared in, and finally 4chan, all sort of share a culture of dropped-out, idle young men,” says Beran. “So you have a lot of young men radicalizing, or being more extreme than they would because they’re spending all their time dropped-out, online… They end up getting a very distorted picture of reality.” Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, is a writer and artist whose work has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, the Huffington Post, the Daily Dot, the Nib, and the Baltimore City Paper.

Post Date: 04-25-2023