In the first post of this series, we established that UX design is never politically neutral. But amplification is only half the story. The more unsettling question is what happens after someone starts seeing more of this content: how do they go from scrolling to sharing, from watching to believing, from believing to spreading?
LaCroix and Berkovits (2026) offer a useful concept for this: the Digital Radical, an individual who has made the transition from passive consumer of extremist content to active propagator of it. Their argument is that this transition isn’t purely psychological or ideological. It is actively encouraged by the architecture of social platforms.
They break this process down into a kind of pipeline, each stage powered by a specific design feature:
- Recommendation engines move users from generic, everyday frustration toward ideologically charged resentment. The frustration was already there, the algorithm gives it a direction and a villain.
- Like and share systems convert that resentment into performative identity. Engaging with extreme content becomes a public signal of who you are.
- One-click sharing removes the last barrier. What used to be a private conviction becomes public propagation, instantly, without any cognitive friction to slow the person down and make them reconsider.
The conclusion LaCroix and Berkovits draw is blunt: the interface itself is the medium of radicalization. Not the ideology alone. Not the individual alone. The interface.
This is arguably the most design-relevant insight in the whole framework. Radicalization researchers have long focused on content and community. But LaCroix and Berkovits point to something UX designers understand intuitively: friction, or its absence, determines behavior. Every “are you sure?” prompt, every extra tap, every moment of pause is a design decision. Removing friction isn’t inherently sinister; it’s usually done to boost engagement metrics. But when the content being frictionlessly shared is extremist, the design choice that was meant to drive growth ends up driving radicalization instead.
It would be a mistake, and an oversimplification this project wants to explicitly avoid, to conclude that platform design causes right-wing extremism. It doesn’t, at least not on its own. Radicalization emerges from an interplay of individual vulnerabilities, social context, and political crises (Youngblood, 2020; Banywana, 2026). Digital infrastructure is an increasingly important factor in that interplay, not a standalone explanation for it.
But “not the sole cause” doesn’t mean “not worth studying.” Digital platforms are, for a growing share of the population, the primary place where political information is absorbed, social identity is formed, and civic participation happens. Whoever doesn’t understand the design logic behind that space is simply at its mercy. Whoever does understand it can start to question it as a user, as a designer, or as a policymaker.
This is the communicative and educational ambition behind the project: building awareness of how platform design encourages radicalization, as a precondition for pushing back against it, individually, and at the level of policy and platform design itself. Concretely, this means identifying and classifying radicalization patterns in interface design, and eventually building a tool that strengthens users’ digital media literacy, aimed especially at young people, whose critical awareness of digital media still needs active support.
