A four-part sob story about screen time is being used to rewrite the rules of the internet.

CHRISTINA MAAS

Somewhere between Black Mirror and a parliamentary white paper, Netflix birthed Adolescence — a four-part drama so hyped it makes The Crown look like daytime TV. Critics have already crowned it “the most brilliant TV drama in years” and even “complete perfection.” Which, in TV review terms, is about one notch above canonizing it and placing a shrine on Rotten Tomatoes, where it currently sits at a smug 99%.

But before you’re guilted into watching it by your friends, your family, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or a “digital safety ambassador,” you might want to know what you’re in for. Because beneath the mournful soundtrack and teary-eyed monologues lies a playbook, not just a plot.

A Knife, an Emoji, and a National Panic

Adolescence follows Jamie, a supposedly normal 13-year-old who one day stabs a female classmate to death — triggered, we’re told, by an emoji implying he’s undateable.

You’d think such a sensationalist plot might provoke some tough questions about plausibility. Instead, it inspired a collective swoon and a full-blown moral crusade. Apparently, the line between a TV drama and a legislative blueprint has all but disappeared.

Writer Jack Thorne and actor Stephen Graham — who stars as Jamie’s heartbroken dad Eddie — aren’t merely promoting a show. They’re touring like policy consultants, meeting MPs, and calling for “serious change.” Or as Thorne put it, “We do believe perhaps the answer to this is in parliament and legislating – and taking kids away from their phones in school and taking kids away from social media altogether.”

Which is great, if your dream of the future involves biometric logins for Minecraft.

When Drama Becomes Policy Proposal

The show is more than a series about a disaffected teen gone rogue. It’s a calculated nudge that comes at the same time as a much bigger campaign — a 21st-century panic attack over children, tech, and the internet, that’s being used to promote censorship and surveillance. If the producers had their way, Adolescence would be shown in schools and parliament.

Even Prime Minister Keir Starmer got in on the act, grandstanding at Prime Minister’s Questions about “violence carried out by young men, influenced by what they see online.” Nothing gets a politician’s pulse racing like the scent of bipartisan panic and a chance to legislate online speech and increase surveillance.

Thorne, sensing his moment, threw Australia into the mix. The country has passed laws threatening platforms like TikTok and Instagram with $32 million fines if they allow under-16s to exist online.

Which, of course, means the introduction of digital ID.

Thorne, obviously never one to aim low, said: “I would extend it further… it is about gaming too, and it’s about getting inside all these different systems.”

Jamie, the show’s mopey, hoodie-clad antihero, serves as the vessel for every contemporary anxiety about teenage boys. He’s alienated. He’s angry. He watches YouTube videos laced with “toxic masculinity.”

Thorne describes him as someone who feels “isolated” and finds “the answer to his pain” in online content. You’d almost forget this is fiction. The creators aren’t interested in ambiguity. They’re here to evangelize — about influencers, incel culture, and the urgent need for supervision of the internet, preferably enforced by law.

It’s convenient messaging. It just so happens to align perfectly with a growing movement toward digital ID which would tie everything you say to your real-world ID, content filtering, and the warm embrace of algorithmic babysitting.

All in the name of “safety“, of course.

Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne are now scheduled to appear before Parliament, invited by Labour MP Josh McAlister. Presumably, they’ll deliver heartfelt monologues about trauma, policy, and the perils of Instagram. The script practically writes itself.

But let’s not pretend Adolescence is just entertainment. It’s media-as-message, a tearjerker-as-toolkit for ushering in broad digital reforms that will affect everyone, not just hormonal teenagers with too much screen time.

Digital rights supporters should be sounding the alarm. Under the guise of online safety, what’s really coming is a regime of ID requirements, content policing, and mass data collection. But in a media landscape where feelings trump facts and fictional stabbings become case studies for policy, those warnings barely register.

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This article (Netflix’s Adolescence is a Trojan Horse For Online Censorship and Surveillance Policy) was created and published by Reclaim the Net and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Christina Maas

Adolescence, Netflix’s ‘Life Saving’ New Show, Is Regime Propaganda Aimed at Grooming a Gullible Public Into Accepting the Online Safety Act

STEVEN TUCKER

Back when I was at school, the only piece of drama I studied in which teenage boys and girls ended up going a bit stabby on one another was Romeo and Juliet. Today, star-cross’d underage lovers are exhorted to instead examine the new four-part Netflix drama Adolescence, which is less by William Shakespeare, more by William Wagfinger.

Supposedly, say the media, this is “the TV show everyone’s watching”, which rather disregards the fact that over 40% of UK households don’t even have Netflix. Nonetheless, all the right people in politics and the mediasphere seem to be viewing it at the moment, and such elevated individuals really do think their own limited breed represent the views of “everyone”, or at least “everyone right-thinking”, when it comes to politically fashionable subjects like toxic masculinity, with which the programme purportedly deals.

Tate Pre-Modern

This is not a review of the show; but then, neither are any of the so-called ‘reviews’ appearing in newspapers right now. Incredibly unrealistic and fawning in their praise, they read more like public proclamations of ideological fealty than dispassionate reviews of a simple media entertainment product. For a more honest assessment, check out the recent piece on this website by Laurie Wastell.

Adolescence is a police procedural concerning the stabbing to death of a schoolgirl, Katie, by a 13 year-old boy, Jamie, after he is mocked by her on social media for being an ‘incel’ – i.e., a sad male loner who spends too much time online without a girlfriend. In a Poirot-like twist, viewers are later gathered together in the metaphorical library and told whoreallydunnit: not Jamie after all, in a way, but Andrew Tate – the well-known manosphere influencer and TikTok star, noted misogynist and alleged rapist and woman-trafficker!

That, at least, is what the media wants us all to believe. Yet one of the show’s two co-writers, Jack Thorne, is at pains to state Jamie doesn’t simply kill Katie after watching Tate’s output, but due to a concatenation of social influences, telling the Guardian: “I certainly hope the conversation around the show doesn’t become about Andrew Tate.” Oh dear – mission failed.

In the deliberately misleading narrative presently being pushed, Andrew Tate is supposedly behind a tidal wave of abuse by young British boys against young British girls. But this narrative goes against actual polling data from YouGov: despite 84% of 13–15-year-old boys in the UK having heard of Mr Tate, only 23% entertain a positive opinion of the man. An overwhelming 63% of boys in the fictional Jamie’s age range view Tate negatively; many actively disagree with his demeaning attitudes towards females, while many are basically unaware of them.

Tate does have his fans, however, and some jumped to his defence, pointing out that The Matrix would “do anything to drag Andrew Tate’s name through the mud. Now they’re [even] trying to link him to a fictional murder.” Not only fictional ones. Last year, Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth, who enjoys the impeccably post-1997 job title of ‘National Lead for Policing Violence Against Women and Girls’, called the “toxic” Tate’s online influence upon young men and boys “quite terrifying”.

Why? How many real-life, off-screen cases of femicide has Tate actually been provably linked with? Not as many as a casual newspaper reader may be led to presume. Andrew didn’t bomb all those little girls to death at the Manchester Arena a few years back, did he? Mere days after Adolescence went up on Netflix, the UK’s counter-terrorism tsar, Robin Simcox, released a report into 100 convicted UK-based terrorists arrested between 2004 and 2021, analysing their “mindset material”, like social media activity. This found that, of the 100 studied, 85 could be classed as Islamists, 14 as ‘far-Right’ (whatever that even is now) and… one as being an incel. Appropriately enough, really, for such a committed breed of professional loners.

Any Resemblance To Actual Persons, Living Or Dead, Is Purely Coincidental

Another individual highly confused between the concepts of fictional and real-life murders is Sir Keir Starmer, who, when asked about the show during PMQs, replied that he was currently viewing it with his own teenage children so as to teach them never to kill any of their classmates themselves, accidentally calling it a “documentary”. A slip of Starmer’s adenoidal tongue, maybe, but the impression that Adolescence really is some kind of docu-drama seems to be one our ruling class is eager for the ill-informed proles to form. But how true-to-life is the show, really?

The drama’s co-writers have explained how, while Jamie and Katie’s own particular tale was entirely invented, the basic conceit was inspired by three real-life stabbings of young girls by young incel boys of a toxically masculine nature.

The first was the murder of teenage trans child Brianna Ghey in Warrington in 2023 by a lonely autistic schoolboy named Eddie Ratcliffe… and a serial-killer-obsessed schoolgirl named Scarlett Jenkinson, who played by far the dominant role in proceedings, like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in reverse. I can’t help but notice that, in this particular agitprop-inspiring case of toxic “male-on-female” violence, the victim was actually a male in a dress, while the main perpetrator was a biological female. Police later found that Jenkinson also had a kill list of intended future victims: all were male. If Little Miss Murder really had been watching manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate online prior to her crime, she can’t have understood their alleged core message very well.

Secondly, there was the tragedy of 12 year-old Ava White, stabbed to death by a 15 year-old boy in Liverpool in 2021 after two groups of friends had argued with one another over the boys recording social media videos of the girls without their permission. It appears the killer had known severe behavioural issues, having previously hit a PCSO and been arrested for assaulting two women. The key issue here, therefore, would appear to be why the demonstrably ultra-violent bundle of toxic masculinity was not already forcibly locked up in some kind of secure institution, not whether he enjoyed watching Andrew Tate speeding about in sports cars and calling women slags on YouTube. But I suspect a didactic drama named Bring Back Borstal! would not have stood as much chance of being commissioned by Netflix.

Thirdly, there was the case of 15 year-old Elianne Andam, stabbed to death by an obviously disturbed 17 year-old named Hassan Sentamu in London in 2023 in an unbelievably petty row over a teddy bear and his being splashed with water by some schoolgirls. As in the Ava White case, Sentamu had what the BBC called “a history of attacking girls and carrying knives”, besides a “short temper and aggressive tendencies”, and yet was still allowed to walk around freely, because to do anything otherwise would no doubt be against his human rights. Sentamu allegedly once threatened to chop his pet cat’s tail off if he didn’t get his own way in something; when Tate advises his followers to get out there and mess up some pussy, I don’t think this is quite what he meant.

So, again, what do Andrew Tate and the online manosphere have to do with this case? Nothing. Given that Sentamu’s disturbance was reputedly triggered not by Tate but by the child suffering abuse from violent adults who beat him with metal poles while he was growing up in Uganda, it may have been more honest to pen a morality play about the likely consequences of shipping in boatloads of psychologically damaged young men from abroad and then dumping them on the streets of a capital city already flooded with black-on-black knife crime. But no – because the most plausible policy suggestion to emerge from discussion of any such series would be: Close the borders now!

And even if the above murders had been directly related to Tate’s evil and immediately corrupting manosphere, I’d observe that, according to a survey of 16–25-year-olds from 2023, black youths – like the real-life Hassan Sentamu – are more than twice as likely to view Tate positively than white youths – like the fictional Jamie – are, at a rate of 41% against 15%. (Asians – usually code for ‘Muslims’ – come somewhere in between at 31%.) But you couldn’t depict the fictional stabber as being black, of course; that would be racist. Instead, the clever detective who works the whole thing out is a black man, black characters being law-abiding saints every bit as much as schoolgirls are on most modern-day British TV shows.

Warped Reality

Yet, despite being demonstrably fictional, with its race-swapped, gender-demonised or gender-beatified villains and victims explicitly designed to appeal to contemporary liberal shibboleths, Adolescence still seems set to influence public policy. Coincidentally or not, the show’s production company, Warp Films, has in the past been part-funded by the UK Government in the shape of the UK Global Film Fund. As co-writer Jack Thorne explained to the Guardian, he now wants the Labour Party to step in and regulate the public’s internet and social media usage:

Spend any time on most social media platforms and you end up, quite quickly, in some dark spaces. Parents can try to regulate this, schools can stop mobile phone access but more needs to be done. There should be government support [re: censorship] because the ideas being expressed are dangerous in the wrong hands and young brains aren’t equipped to cope with them… We wanted to make something that people want to watch, of course, but we also wanted to pose a question that got people talking on their sofas, in pubs, in schools, maybe even in Parliament… We will not solve the problem by kicking this issue into the long grass. This requires urgent action. I hope the Government is brave enough.

Possible translation: “Please beef up the Online Safety Act. If we don’t, more made-up children like Katie will die!” According to one Guardian headline: “Adolescence is such powerful TV that it could save lives.” The basis for this claim? Hours before crossbow killer Kyle Clifford murdered his ex-lover and her equally female sister and mother, he had “searched online for misogynistic podcasts and watched Andrew Tate videos”. True, but I’d strongly imagine this particular outright lunatic was going to perform such atrocities anyway. Which social media influencers did Jack the Ripper once watch on his own Victorian-era clockwork-powered iPhone?

Such feverishly partisan reviews, features and interviews are really just calls for strengthening the Online Safety Act (inevitably soon to become known as the ‘Adolescence Act’) to censor politically unwelcome views and perspectives from public access, ineptly disguised as glowing reviews of a TV drama.

And then, lo and behold, this desired leap from the pages of the script onto the pages of the statute books begins to rapidly take place – ostension in action. “I want it [Adolescence] to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial because this is only going to get worse,” Jack Thorne demanded. So has Labour MP Annelise Midgley, who stood up in the Commons and asked the Prime Minister to do Thorne’s bidding and ensure it is indeed shown in schools. Because otherwise, ALL OUR CHILDREN WILL DIE.

Sir Keir was only too happy to comply. The show’s co-writers have now been invited to a meeting to discuss online safety with MPs. The PM certainly seems very eager to take the advice of the State-funded ‘documentary’ to heart: “This violence [i.e., the stabbing of Katie, who does not exist] carried out by young men by what they see online is a real problem. It’s abhorrent, and we have to tackle it.” But only if the toxic online loners being influenced into such violence happen to be conveniently white, like Jamie, it seems.

Online Harams Act

Last week, news of another sinister, woman-hating online influencer also came to light, but media reviewers of Adolescence strangely failed to link him to the drama in any way, shape or form. This is because his name was Mahamed Abdur-Razaq, a volunteer preacher at Birmingham’s An-Noor Masjid Mosque and Community Centre, which fine institution had placed a lecture of the scholar about Islamic gender relations on YouTube for all to see.

In this highly Tate-topping video, the Islamic influencer had explained how, according to Koranic law, if a wife refused to have sex with her husband, “he’s allowed to hit her”. If told to have sex by her owner, she should agree “straight away… without delaying”, whilst showing no “dislike”, even if she is being “forced to do it”. The “doubts of the feminists and the kuffar” that such practices may be considered rape should just be ignored, he concluded, otherwise you were just a total cuck-fag, bro, before jumping from his lectern and giving a high-five to the nearest passing bling-clad imam.

Who do you think, all things considered, would be likely to have more social influence amongst young males in this country today, where 6% of the population are now Muslims, a demographic heavily skewed towards the testosterone-fuelled under-30s? Andrew Tate, an independent spokesman only for his own excessively ego-filled self, or a man like Mahamed Abdur-Razaq, who poses as having the backing of an entire global religion, together with its religious institutions and holy book, not to mention the inviolable law of Almighty Allah Himself? I say it’s Mahamed, so where’s the quasi-state-financed Netflix drama aimed at stopping the spread of the dangerous, women-hating messages of people like him, then?

I note that Andrew Tate is a Muslim convert himself, by the way, sincere or otherwise. Allegedly, he found Mecca as a marketing tactic, perhaps identifying the religion’s young men as an ideal target audience for his message. If so, what could it have been about certain practitioners of the faith who may have given him the impression they were receptive to his repellent spiel?

Crude, flash, self-fellating show-off Andrew Tate may be, but I think there may be worse online role models out there for teenage boys these days. Someone should really write a TV show warning parents about them.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.

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This article (Adolescence, Netflix’s ‘Life Saving’ New Show, Is Regime Propaganda Aimed at Grooming a Gullible Public Into Accepting the Online Safety Act) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Steven Tucker

Featured image: x.com

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