BANGLADESH has been in the mobile era for more than three decades although it has been in the thick of it for a decade and a half with the introduction of 3G network that began in 2012. What began basic calls and texts has now become a flood of video, algorithm and addiction reaching every home. A 14-year-old boy in a village now has access to the same world as a student at the University of Dhaka does. But the difference lies in protection. The urban child is somewhat supervised. The rural child is not. Parents are busy with work. Grandparents do not understand the complex world of mobiles. So, the village adolescent absorb whatever they see — no filter and no guide. The algorithm pulls them from one to the next — laughter, obscenity, rage and meaninglessness. This boundless, directionless openness is the greatest risk.
TikTok, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts are not neutral windows. They were built to hold attention. The most addictive mechanism is variable reward — to keep scrolling not knowing what will come up next. Psychologist BF Skinner discovered this principle. The algorithm does not know whether the user is 13 years old. It knows that sexual and violent content keeps people watching longer. So, it delivers that to children, too.
In Europe, the media evolved step by step: the printing press, newspapers, radio, television and the internet. It took nearly a hundred years. At each stage, society, parents and the education system had time to adapt. In Bangladesh, everything arrived almost together, compressed into the last decade’s smartphone revolution. No one had time. The gap between the pace of technological change and the pace of social adaptation is what sociologists call the cultural lag. When this lag occurs, the old values and norms can no longer keep pace with the new technology and the result is confusion, instability and uncontrolled change.
One natural characteristic of the adolescent brain is that its emotional and reward centres mature rapidly, but judgement, empathy and impulse control take until the age of 25 to fully develop. The algorithm exploits this gap. The most terrifying exploitation of this gap occurs through sexual and pornographic content because it strikes directly at the most vulnerable point in the adolescent brain. Cambridge neuroscientist Valerie Voon and her colleagues showed in 2014 that the brains of those addicted to pornography display neural patterns similar to those addicted to drugs; the brake system weakens, appetite grows and stopping becomes impossible.
Healthy psychological development requires time, guidance and the opportunity to process and understand what one has seen. In traditional society, if a child saw something disturbing, they could talk to a parent or grandparent. Lessons such as ‘that is not right’ or ‘that is a false image on screen’ would reach them. Digital indigestion occurs when the volume, speed and the intensity of online content grows so overwhelmingly that the mind has no time to understand or process it. There is no one beside them. The next video is already loading. The child watches on, without understanding, thinking and stopping.
This process inflicts four kinds of damage. Firstly, emotional volatility: a woman notices her son laughing at the phone one minute, furious the next. Secondly, the erosion of empathy: once, when someone fell ill, others showed care; now everyone is absorbed in their phones, unable to feel a friend’s pain sitting right beside them. Thirdly, distorted perception: a boy watches bodies treated as objects of entertainment, faces without names and persons without feelings. Gradually, the screen’s logic becomes his logic: another person’s discomfort is irrelevant to his desire. Fourthly, weakened emotional regulation: the mother asks him to put the phone down; the boy raises his hand at her. A moment later, he may even weep. But what was done is done. The space between feeling and action, where judgement was supposed to live, is simply no longer there.
The four wounds are real. Here is another truth that must be understood: Bangladesh was slowly changing, moving from tradition towards modernity. The social control mechanisms of society, what we might call the social antivirus, were slowly adapting. This antivirus existed to warn against all forms of abnormal behaviour: unhealthy sexuality, violence, gambling and callousness. At this moment of transition, the digital revolution arrived so fast, so overwhelmingly, like a destructive virus. The digital world is so rapid, vast, varied that the social antivirus is left bewildered. It can no longer recognise what is forbidden and what is normal. When the antivirus stops working, digital poison enters the body unchecked. And, this uncontrolled entry is digital indigestion.
Among all the poisons of the digital world, sexual and obscene content is the most dangerous. Because it strikes directly at the foundation of a person’s desire, relationship and moral judgement. The half-clothed dances, suggestive scenes and provocative songs scattered across TikTok and YouTube gradually enter the child’s mind as ‘normal.’ Eventually pornography arrives, with all concealment stripped away. Watching extreme sexuality repeatedly, the child’s ‘shock absorber’ dies. Shame is gone. Judgement is gone. Empathy is gone. By then, the real woman or child before him is no longer a ‘person’ in his eyes, only a ‘prey.’ And that mind, given an opportunity, acts.
Research in 2024, conducted across more than 8,000 adolescents, found internet addiction symptoms in 63 per cent and compulsive pornography use in about 62.9 per cent. A 2017 field study in Khulna found that 81 per cent of students had been exposed to pornography before the age of 16. These are red signals of a civilisational danger. That almost 63 per cent of adolescents will one day grow up, with much of their psychology having already begun to deform. They are not today’s perpetrators; they may be tomorrow’s criminals if no one intervenes now.
Digital poison does not directly create criminals. It prepares the soil. When rain falls, the seed sprouts. It happens in three stages.
Normalisation. A 13-year-old boy. No sex education in school. At home, parents turn away from the subject. The algorithm first shows him hand-holding, then partial nudity, then direct sexual acts, eventually extreme sex acts. At each step, the sense of shame weakens. Eventually everything becomes ‘normal.’ Through repeated exposure, eventually even the most forbidden sexual behaviours — cruelty, coercion and attraction to children — become ‘normal;’ shame dies and judgment halts.
Erosion of empathy and dehumanisation. The ‘mirror neuron system,’ the capacity to feel another’s pain , weakens. The performers in commercial pornography are professionals acting voluntarily. But, the child does not understand this. For children, what they see on screen is reality. There they see domination, coercion and objectification. The brain records: ‘arousal means control over another and desire means turning someone into an object.’ Eventually, the real woman or child before him becomes merely an ‘object.’ Today’s 13-year-old is watching this script as ‘normal.’ Fifteen years later, as a 32-year-old man, he will enact that script.
The death of a moral compass. Having passed through the first two stages, the adolescent’s ‘normal’ has shifted, his empathy near-dead. Yet, he still holds back because a final barrier remains: a sense of ethics. ‘This is wrong.’ The feeling saves him. Digital indigestion does not destroy the feeling of ‘wrong.’It removes the measuring rod by which ‘wrong’ is defined. What was once wrong is now ‘normal.’ So, when an opportunity arises, the question — is this wrong? — does not even arise. Only desire stirs. The act is committed. Furthermore, if drugs are present, they act as an accelerant; but the real work of making a criminal has already been done by digital indigestion. And, the pervasive presence of drugs is another epidemic, another story.
The poison of digital indigestion works identically in the mob mind. Just as a lone rapist sees his victim as an ‘object,’ the mob, too, sees its target as merely an ‘object’ or a ‘symbol.’ In both cases, the feeling that ‘this is wrong’ has already died. The victim of a mob lynching is no longer a human being; the victim becomes a solitary symbol.
We have seen how digital indigestion shapes a single individual, one who sees a child as an ‘object’ and whose moral compass is dead. But, this process does not create only individual criminals. When the algorithm simultaneously strips empathy and moral judgement from thousands of minds, the mob becomes the hunter. The lone rapist and the mob lyncher are different shapes of the same disease. At the root of both lies the objectification of a human being and the destruction of the feeling that ‘this is wrong.’
The algorithm has been engineered to reach the emotional alarm system before the rational brain wakes up; and, it does this deliberately because reaction is its revenue. MIT research shows that false and emotionally provocative content spreads six times faster than truth. The algorithm rewards what generates reaction, not what is true. The formula in Bangladesh is clear: rumour on WhatsApp and unverified posting on Facebook gather a crowd, beating, killing. Suffering becomes content. The criminal becomes a performer.
French sociologist Émile Durkheim spoke of collective effervescence, which is the intense solidarity of experiencing emotion together. Today, it has become a weapon of destruction. Traditionally, children were protected by the watchful eyes of the community — the neighbour’s gaze. When everyone is submerged in a screen, the watchfulness vanishes.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt says that the gap between thinking and acting is the space where morality lives. Digital indigestion destroys that gap, in the individual criminal’s mind and in the collective mind of the mob. There is no road back. Smartphones and the internet are now part of life. The question is: will we control them or will they control us? So, what could be done immediately?
A change in the education system is essential. A subject titled ‘digital technology and Bangladesh’ could be introduced at the secondary level where students learn the traps of algorithms, digital impact and are given a realistic picture of healthy relationship and sexuality. If it is not possible in schools, a small booklet should be delivered to every student. Technology cannot be countered without understanding it.
Any company that floods children’s screens with digital content must meet several requirements to run in Bangladesh: age verification, transparent Bangla reporting, legal accountability, algorithm transparency, independent auditing and effective content moderation in Bangla. A ban is not enough; accountability is the answer.
Today’s children are tomorrow’s future. Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe have enacted laws to protect children. Are our children worth less? What is needed is a legal shield, built on our own soil which holds platforms accountable.
Friday sermons at mosques can be mobilised. If the imam speaks for three minutes about the traps of algorithms, how large corporations are turning minds into products, it will reach more people than any government document.
Parents and teachers must understand the economics, psychology and social impact of digital platforms: how algorithms spread hate for profit and how extreme content kills shame and justice. Phone skills are not enough; recognising the algorithm’s trap is essential.
In the past decade, Bangladesh has compressed a hundred years of media evolution. We have placed in the hands of children a supercomputer without a manual. The algorithm does not hate us; it is indifferent to us. It is this indifference, unregulated and optimised for profit, that devours the minds of the children.
Technology cannot be stopped, but technology can be questioned. Instead of blindly obeying the algorithm, we can learn the language of controlling it. The only question is: do we want to learn that language? Or do we prefer to watch silently?
AKM Shameem Akhter, a social scientist, is a senior government official.
