A few years ago, a flash mob meant gathering in a public place to dance, or engage in some harmless act of collective absurdity. The goal was novelty. The participants sought attention, but not victims.
In May, approximately 200 teenagers gathered at The Pike in Long Beach after a meetup circulated through social media. The evening ended with a mass brawl and multiple arrests.
A few weeks later, hundreds of teenagers descended on Crown Beach in Alameda after invitations spread online. The gathering deteriorated into fights and two were shot.
Around the same time, two people suffered serious injuries on Hawaii’s North Shore after a large group of teenagers allegedly attacked one victim at random and then assaulted another who attempted to intervene.
This July 4, the Newport Beach Police Department made over 400 arrests after police responded to thousands of teenagers and young adults converging on Newport Pier for a social media fueled riot where fighting broke out, fireworks were launched into the crowd, roads became blocked, and a grocery store was stormed and looted.
Further north in Lake Tahoe, the beaches were closed early on the 4th of July due to large crowds of “unruly teenagers, public intoxication, and illegal fireworks.”
These incidents occurred miles apart, under different local governments, involving different groups of young people and different circumstances. Yet the pattern is remarkably similar.
A location circulates online. Hundreds of young people converge on a public space. Disorder follows. Videos spread. The clips accumulate likes, views, shares, and comments. Attention becomes its own reward and the cycle repeats itself in another city.
The original flash mobs of the early internet era were often playful acts of coordinated performance. In the social media era, attention itself has become a form of currency, measured in likes, views, shares, followers, and engagement.
The goal is to get more.
The incidents unfolding on beaches, in shopping districts, parks, and entertainment venues suggest a different question altogether: What happens when online behavior begins reshaping public order offline?
That question receives surprisingly little attention.
One reason may be that policymakers continue to examine social media, juvenile justice, youth mental health, alcohol and drug use, and public safety as separate issues. Increasingly, they may be interconnected.
Social media platforms don’t need to encourage violence to reward escalation as the incentive structure or “likes” can do that on its own. What makes this particularly challenging is that many of the institutions responsible for governing modern adolescence were designed for a different social environment.
Today, a young person’s status can be measured instantly through likes, views, followers, and engagement metrics visible far beyond their school or neighborhood.
The answers may be right in front of us.
There’s good science behind the idea that keeping active minds engaged in positive and meaningful activity has positive effects.
In the 1990s Iceland experienced some of the highest rates of teenage alcohol, tobacco, and drug use in Europe with all the attendant negative social consequences: public intoxication, fights, vandalism, and thefts. In 1998, 42 percent of Icelandic teenagers reported being intoxicated in the last 30 days, 23 percent used tobacco, and 17 percent marijuana. Yet, by 2019, that same study showed those numbers dropped to 7, 6 and 2 percent respectively.
Here’s another statistic: 74 percent of teenagers had reported being out after midnight; by 2016, the number had dropped to 31 percent.
How they achieved these results is not in and of itself complicated. But perhaps marshalling the political will was.
The answer was an elaborate form of community engagement designed to create protective programming that involved families, peers, schools, and “leisure time” guided by 5 principles:
- Apply a primary prevention approach that is designed to enhance the social environment
- Emphasize community action and embrace schools as the natural hub of neighborhood/area efforts to support child and adolescent health, learning, and life success
- Engage and empower community members to make practical decisions using local, high-quality, accessible data and diagnostics
- Integrate researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and community members into a unified team dedicated to solving complex, real-world problems
- Match the scope of the solution to the scope of the problem, including emphasizing long-term intervention and efforts to marshal adequate community resources
This became the Icelandic Prevention Model.
In simple terms, they made robust financial and community investments in prevention and treatment that worked, much of it supporting parenting, sports, music, and the arts.
The adolescent desire for acceptance has not changed. The mechanisms through which it is earned, displayed, and rewarded has.