Watching my friend become pink-pilled

By Stella Fenwick

We met in a Philosophy class in Sixth Form and bonded over our love of books. We went for coffee every week. She got angry when I took too long to reply to her messages, and we always tried to take turns visiting each other at uni. After more than 3 years of friendship, she blocked me across social media when I asked her about some homophobic posts she liked.

Recently, I’ve been reading Pink-Pilled by Lois Shearing, a new book about how women can easily become part of anti-feminist right-wing groups through online trends such as tradwives and motherhood groups. The book starts with a discussion of Girl Defined, a pair of Christian content creators I remember laughing about with the rest of the internet 7 years ago. When I typed in their name to see what they’re like today, I noticed that my friend’s username appeared below their Instagram bio. Then I saw her name under Donald Trump’s account. I searched her following list with his name, and the entire Trump family popped up. It did not take long for my obsession with her ‘Following’ list to begin. It was just me, my benefit of the doubt, and her list of 1,700 accounts for weeks in a twisted love-triangle obsession.

Did I have a responsibility to talk to her about the misinformation she was liking, following, and therefore boosting to other vulnerable people?

I scrolled for hours and days through her list, trying to interpret each of the likes she gave to inflammatory posts. Every account I clicked on was awash with thinly veiled hatred and misinformation weaponised against minority groups, Feminism, and any religion other than Christianity. I was addicted to feeling the burn in my stomach as I saw what her eyes had seen and enjoyed. After wading through them all, I guessed that half of her list was right-wing accounts, but potentially many beyond my guess were hiding their beliefs behind the very personas that draw so many young women in. Shearing’s book describes how these attractive front-facing personas draw vulnerable people into their smaller blogs, Telegram channels, and private group chats. I was only able to see the tip of my friend’s online iceberg. 

When I noticed my friend was following these influencers who declared themselves ‘anti-feminist’ and ‘embracing femininity’, posting AI religious imagery and inflammatory hatred against all minority groups, including other women, I was speechless. I tried to deny my gut feeling that she was no longer the friend I originally had. Her likes and follows transcended language; their wordlessness was hard to interpret and easy for me to make excuses for.

I told myself that everyone goes to uni and changes their values by exploring different beliefs. I told myself that everyone has the right to follow whatever accounts they like without being taken as evidence that they subscribe to the beliefs they represent. I told myself this, but I couldn’t believe it. The only thing I could believe was that my friend was turning into something dangerous. 

Little did I know that that would be the last time I would speak to my best friend

Did I have a responsibility to talk to her about the misinformation she was liking, following, and therefore boosting to other vulnerable people? Was it my job to tell her that seeing her support transphobic content made me uncomfortable, even if I shouldn’t take a pink heart as a political vote? Did she even deserve to be told my thoughts before silently ghosting her? I didn’t know what I owed to her, and I felt too repulsed to bridge the gap I had created by sniffing out the wordless trail she thought I would never find. 

After days of worrying, I finally confronted her with my gallery of screenshotted evidence. Little did I know that that would be the last time I would speak to my best friend. Was she going to tell me she was following them all ironically, to laugh at them? That it was just to keep a finger on the political pulse? Within a second, she replied. “I’m happy you asked!!” She said that it was “personal interest”, and because one of her modules requires her to “keep up with the news”.

I believed her as best I could, but I couldn’t stop myself from scrolling deeper into her internet history. I sent her a couple of homophobic and anti-abortion memes, which her little profile picture hovered over with a pink heart, with the message “I’m finding it hard to believe that these memes are going to be used for uni research”. She didn’t even open that last message. Our friendship was wiped away within a few minutes, as wordlessly as her little pink hearts fell, light as confetti, across hundreds of accounts poised against my right to existence.

More and more, we are all going to be cutting friendship and familial ties because of the current state of online polarisation. This process made me realise that we cannot know our friends when we spend the majority of our days consuming strange media online. With Adolescence and the manosphere in the news, I never thought that it could happen to a girl I once thought I knew. But it really does happen to anyone. This is the reality of having one eye on the scary world around us, and one eye on the almighty endless scroll that promises ‘answers’. How many more friends and family members will we lose to these online worlds before the little pink hearts turn black? 

Image: CottonBro Studio/Pexels