#Overton Window

[frownyalfred]

(different anon) see now I wondering if actually the Overton window is shifting in the other direction, if we try to clumsily apply real world attitudes to the omegaverse. Would it not be the liberals, claiming that we're better than our "worst/animal" instincts and that in fact moving away from the Pack structure is progress, whereas the conservatives are the ones advocating for "traditional" Pack structures?

I guess they are kind of inverted in that world aren’t they? The “nuclear family unit” is a new concept and not a traditional one. It’s conservative about gender but liberal about secondary dynamic. Which is a mindfuck now that I’m actually typing it out. My head hurts.

…does this make Clark and Bruce social conservatives? Oh god. But I suppose it depends on how you view secondary dynamics and instinct. Are they truly something to defy, or is that inherently harmful no matter how you spin it? I think that’s the through line in all of this, that denying those instinctive structures in pursuit of an artificial family structure only hurts people, even if it’s for good reasons. Hmmm.

[xclowniex]

It's crazy how the overton window for antisemitism has shifted.

The overton window describes the concept that there is a window of what is considered socially acceptable. This window can shift over time in either direction if more people start to believe more in policies from one side

I can't be bothered making a proper graph so I've typed it out going from unthinkable on the red to unthinkable on the blue side, with the ideal overton window in purple with the middle one being the most ideal. (((Zionists))) represents when people say zionist but either directly or indirectly mean jews and is a play on an antisemitic dogwhistle

Killing all jews

Putting all jews in prison

Restricting movement of jews

Restricting jewish businesses

Disliking jews but not doing anything about it

Being against all forms antisemitism

Disliking Israel but not holding jews accountable for Israel's actions

Boycotting (((zionist))) businesses

Preventing (((zionists))) from accessing places

Destroying Israel

Killing all (((zionists)))

The overton window should be the purple I coloured. But unfortunately it has shifted lean so that "disliking jews but not doing anything about it" is pushed into the red and "boycotting (((zionist))) business is now purple and in the overton window. And it is even sadly starting to shift further to push "being against all forms of antisemitism" out and include "preventing (((zionists from accessing places"

Ideally the window should only cover "all forms of antisemitism is bad" but to be a realist, what I typed out should be what it is. It should not be shifted towards any side

[odinsblog]

One About The Atmosphere: Want to change minds? Stop trying. Change the atmosphere instead.

Donald Trump in 2016 greets a screaming horde of ecstatic white christian nationalists

Minivan was a nice enough guy. He was easygoing; a happy guy with a frequently deployed smile. I don’t recall much anger from him, nor many strongly held opinions. I wouldn’t call him a philosophical type. No deep late night talks with Stove Minivan is my recollection.

This is the sort of dude I’d hang out with at a party, if there were a party we were both at, but not one with whom I’d maintain a relationship if we both graduated and then moved to different places—which I know for a fact, because that’s what happened. We drifted.

So then what happened is twelve years or so later I got on The Facebook, and Stove Minivan was there, too, and before long, we were friends again, he and I, and so were me and my other college friends, and them with him, and … look, you know the drill. It was The Facebook.

Minivan was no longer a pre-med student at a small northern liberal arts college. He was a doctor—a general care practitioner, if memory serves—in a smallish plains state town, very much like many other towns in the great plains or elsewhere in the country, I imagine.

Anyway, before long I noticed something about Minivan. Even though his feed was full of pictures of him and his lovely family, and he was smiling in them just the same as he always had in college, he was angry.

He was *enraged*

What was he angry about? The Demonrats.

Minivan was absolutely enraged about everything the Demonrats did. He also was out of his mind angry about Killary, and Obummer, the leaders of the Demonrats—or at least they were the front for the real leader of the Demonrats, who even back then I believe was George Soros.

What did the Demonrats do? Oh my heck, what *didn’t* they do? Mostly they hated America and American security and American economic strength, it seems. They engaged in corruption and bowed to foreign powers a lot. They shredded the dignity of the presidency, that’s for sure.

Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

I couldn’t help to notice that the Demonrats weren’t actually doing many of the things that Minivan thought they were doing.

And I noticed other things.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the policies Minivan supported were directly *causing* the sorts problems that made Minivan so angry.

And I couldn’t help but notice that well-sourced information enraged him more than pretty much anything else.

There was a lot of linking to sites I’d never heard of, like Breitbart and Newsmax, and of course plenty of Fox News. There were a lot of memes. There were a lot of conspiracy theories (a big birther, was Minivan).

Some of his posts contained subtle bigotry. Most of the rest contained not-subtle bigotry. Several of them contained slogans and statements that were, very simply, neo Nazi and white supremacist memes and shibboleths.

There was a lot of commentary accompanying these posts from Minivan, who was saying shocking stuff for a small-town family doctor … the sorts of things that it seemed to me would make people not want to use this person as a doctor, or or sit next to that person on a bus.

I hadn’t heard of Alex Jones, yet, but Minivan sounded a lot like Alex Jones, word for word and beat for beat. He’d even start his posts like a right-wing radio host: Sorry folks, but you can’t even make stuff like this up—ironically, accompanying things that had been made up.

This was all pretty distressing to those of us who had known Minivan back in the day, before he had become so obsessed with Demonrats.

So, a lot of us, myself included, did exactly what The Facebook wants.

We engaged with him.

At the time my belief was, you defeated bad ideas with better ideas, by confronting the bad ideas directly with the better ideas. Debate was for changing minds. You presented your ideas, they presented theirs, you countered, they countered, eventually everybody saw the truth.

But the intention was that I’d change his mind, with facts presented logically, delivered calmly and patiently.

This was my belief.

What happened confounded me, but perhaps you can predict it.

Minivan escalated any correction, however calmly stated or bloodlessly presented, into scorched earth territory. He rejected all proofs by rejecting the source outright as irrevocably tainted by bias, or he’d spiral into non sequitur, spamming our feeds with more misinformation.

He would claim he never said things he had just said, even though the statements were still there for anybody to read, one comment earlier in the thread.

He’d claim that I said things I'd never said, as anyone foolish enough to read through our conversations could discover.

He demonstrated a complete dedication to his ignorance and anger, and a total disinterest in anything like observable truth that contradicted his grievance.

It was confounding and unfamiliar behavior to me, at the time.

At the time.

All of it was larded with grievance, a sense that people like him had never wronged anybody, and everybody else had done nothing but wrong people like him.

The bigotry and authoritarianism grew.

And all the time, on Facebook, he and his family kept smiling their perfect smiles.

I’ll admit that over time my interactions stopped being polite and bloodless, and I’m not particularly sorry for it. I told him some things about himself he seemed not to know, but which I thought really ought to be said.

I have a bit of a penchant for sarcasm, which you may have noticed.

I employed this skill, and you can feel how you want to about sarcasm, but I think it helped convey the correct posture to take toward someone who says the sorts of things Minivan was saying.

The correct posture being "you have proved yourself to be a person who should not be taken seriously, and your positions do not deserve even a modicum of respect."

I found this a more healthy message to convey about Minivan to anybody watching, and I still do.

Eventually he blocked me, and he was out of my life forever. It was the right choice, and I'm very glad he did that.

I’ve pondered the incident since, as it’s become more and more relevant to “the way things are.”

A few things had become clear over time.

Minivan was not somebody whose intentions could be trusted. He was not operating in good faith, and I believe he well knew it, because many of his favorite sources of information have written instruction books on how to engage with people in bad faith.

Minivan was not debating; he was using debate to inject his counterfactual beliefs into the discourse, which were designed to further marginalize already marginalized people while simultaneously cloaking himself in self-exonerating grievance.

More, he was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.

Further still: Minivan *learned* from me. The effect of telling him he was using one or another logical fallacy was not to sharpen his reasoning, but to teach him about the existence of logical fallacies, which let him (incorrectly) accuse others of those same logical fallacies.

So Minivan was deploying the language of logic, in ways that betrayed a total lack of understanding about what those fallacies were, granted, but in ways that likely made him seem more knowledgeable and reasonable to a casual or sympathetic observer.

He learned to ape our phrases and arguments, in much the way he’d learned to ape the style of Alex Jones and all the various Breitbart and Newsmax contributors he used to inform himself.

And these days it occurs to me: I hear a lot about "groomers."

We were not changing him by engaging with him thoughtfully.

We certainly weren’t changing him by engaging with him in kind.

Rather: we were making him better at what he was doing, and we were validating his world view—to himself and others—as one that merited engagement.

And week after week on Facebook, Minivan kept smiling and smiling and getting angrier and angrier, at us and Obummer and all the other Demonrats and liberals and every member of every minority group who dared to fail to ceaselessly assure him that he was right about everything.

I don’t miss Minivan's black-hole-sun smile. I think of it as my first hint of MAGA: politically overrepresented, socially coddled people, often living outwardly happy privileged lives, while seething inwardly that other people might be getting anything, anything at all.

Indeed, soon enough, another figure would come on the scene, whose behavior matched that of Minivan almost exactly, a perfect avatar for this spirit of aggrieved bigotry and supremacy that seemed to be moving through my former friend.

And sure enough, as I saw, there were millions and millions of smiling seething people who loved him.

And that guy became president.

Nobody believed he would. And then he did.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier.

He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance.

It's an invitation they leapt at, to which they cling even now.

It's a constituency immune to proof, angered by equality, cheered by cruelty, who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning within which they have demand to be seated, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And afterward, a huge number of those shocked by this development decided the proper reaction was to accommodate it, in the name of unity—a belief, it seems, grounded in the idea that what you choose to get along with isn’t as important as getting along no matter what.

I’ll finish with the question that all of Minivan’s former friends would eventually ask, whenever they gathered together long enough for the subject to arise.

"What the hell happened to Minivan?"

Here’s the answer, I think: nothing.

Nothing happened to Minivan. Nothing at all.

He was always that guy, and he always thought the things he thought.

What changed was that he was given a lot of language with which to express those ideas, and access to enough other people who thought that way too, that it created a critical mass of permission.

The permission allowed him to change his attitudes and actions, and created a lot of other people willing to accommodate and normalize his antisocial anti-reality behavior, rather than reject it out of hand.

In college you could be pretty conservative, honestly. It was a pretty conservative place. But you couldn't behave like Minivan later would.

You’d be understood to be a far-right extremist, and people would then treat you like a far-right extremist.

Which is what you'd be.

I think it just wasn't possible for Minivan to be what he later became, because the atmosphere wasn't conducive to the possibility.

But then the atmosphere changed.

If we want to change it back, it's worth thinking about how atmospheres change.

(source)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

This week, a Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage. I’ll let that sit with you a moment. The 24-year-old—found bleeding and unconscious outside her apartment complex—was charged with ‘concealing a death’ and ‘abandoning a dead body’ after placing fetal remains in the trash. Georgia has no law dictating how to dispose of miscarriage remains, but police arrested her anyway. Her mugshot is already splashed across the local crime pages. Did you know that one million American women miscarry every year? I hope the cops are ready to run out of film. While this young woman sat behind bars, Georgia lawmakers considered a bill that would lock up even more women: The Prenatal Equal Protection Act (HB 441) would charge abortion patients as murderers—a crime punishable by life in prison or the death penalty. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the headlines. From the Associated Press to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, HB 441 is being covered as a “total abortion ban” rather than a radical step toward punishing women. Fertility doctors could also be jailed for life; under HB 441, discarding frozen embryos would be a criminal offense. Fertility specialist Dr. Karenne Fru asked lawmakers at a Thursday hearing, “Am I guilty of murder? That makes me a serial killer.” This isn’t an issue of a single extremist state. The legislation in Georgia is one of eleven ‘equal protection’ bills that have been introduced across the country since the start of the year. All of them seek to punish women who have abortions. The rest of us, of course, remain suspect: An Idaho legislator explained to a reporter last month that his ‘equal protection’ bill would allow for the investigation of miscarriages. We’re barely three years out from the end of Roe. Still think feminists are ‘hysterical’?

We warned that this would happen. For decades, feminists screamed from the rooftops that banning abortion would kill women and jail miscarriage patients. In response, we were accused of fear-mongering—called career overreactors desperate to paint all women as victims. I don’t know if it was a knee-jerk distaste of feminism or straight-up denial, but too many Americans never believed we would get here. Now that we are here, too many Americans don’t seem to realize it. Maybe that’s because it barely warrants a mention in the country’s top publications. You can blame it on the constant overwhelm of political news and overstretched newsrooms, but think about it this way: One in four American women will have an abortion. If nearly a dozen states were considering legislation to jail a quarter of all American men, do you think the front pages would be silent? One in five women will have a miscarriage. If police started arresting men for something that happens to 20 percent of them, do you think anyone would stand for it? We all know the answer. I first wrote about the young woman arrested in Georgia three days ago. That’s an eternity in journalism, yet the story still hasn’t been picked up by a single major news outlet. I’d like to demand outrage, but at this point I’d settle for acknowledgement. Is this just our new normal? Women being arrested if a cop doesn’t like how they miscarried, and lawmakers debating whether to put us to death before breaking for fucking lunch? Has everyone lost their minds? I know there’s a lot going on, but surely the personhood of half the population rates a smattering of attention!

Anti-abortion insanity: a 24-year old Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage.

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

"The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population - the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians - in the work of organizing a socialist economy." - Lenin

(Pt.2)

[olena]

The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

(fuck that guy 🇺🇦🖕)

+

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.

The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

+

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

+

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

+

The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[heliophile-oxon]

That window, Mr. Overton, it's moving such an awful lot - why, a fellow can scarce keep track of the dashed thing!

[the-august-one]

[chlochette-sunde]

Let's talk about the Overton window

What is the Overton window?

It’s a sociological concept that represents the range of policies considered politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.

This range can widen, narrow, or shift over time, depending on the political discourse presented to the public.

For example:

If a person of influence suddenly starts publicly endorsing far-right ideas, like suggesting the police should be allowed 'one really violent day, one rough hour,' then the notion of mass deportation of migrants may start to seem more acceptable, and the Overton window shifts to the right.

If multiple influential people begin calling for mass deportations, the Overton window shifts further in that direction.

If influential voices stop discussing far-left ideas, such as anti-colonialism, then the Overton window broadens in a way that pushes topics like health coverage for immigrant populations to the ‘far-left’ and thus to the margins of acceptability.

According to this concept, if you want socialism to be heard again, you first need the more radical leftist voices—anarchists, anti-colonialists, communists, and others—to speak up loudly. These voices help stretch the boundaries of the window and make more moderate leftist ideas, like socialism, part of the mainstream conversation. From there, it’s crucial for all leftist ideas to be as vocal and visible as possible to continue shifting the window and expanding what is seen as acceptable.

The concept explained in other words:

[ramveins]

Whenever I see tweets like the one below, I get so confused because it feels like people just want to move the Overton window over but for... writing tropes? Instead of simply picking a less extreme trope to read from???

(Also the implication that people who read more "problematic" types of e2l stories must love oppressors and bullies in real life is a little... 😬)

^My badly done visualization for reference that does Not include all forms of (thing)-to-lovers just fyi lol

[odinsblog]

For a very long time mainstream media has been conflating the word “moderate” with the word “conservative,” and moving the Overton Window further to the right.

And at the same time, the words “leftist” and “radical” and “extremists” are also being conflated, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Liz Cheney is not a moderate. Chris Christie is not a moderate. Nikki Haley definitely is not a moderate. I guess it’s nice that they are finally calling out Trump, but they all voted for Trump (twice!) and none of them are good people. (How do I know they aren’t good people? Because they spent most of their adult lives and careers supporting harmful conservative policies that intentionally target women and poor/Black/disabled/LGBTQ people to harm.)

The same goes for pundits like Ana Navarro and the other MSNBC “former” Republicans and Republican strategists who don’t like Trump anymore, but are still “proud conservatives.” They support most of Trump’s policies even if they don’t support Trump anymore. And Nikki Haley has even said that if the choice in November comes down to Biden or Trump, she believes that it’s who is Biden the bigger threat to America. (source)

And Nikki Haley has repeatedly said that she would pardon Trump, so that’s another big NOAP for me.

Look, I understand that neoliberals and conservative leaning Democrats have a tendency to kick left + kiss right, but people have GOT to learn that just because a conservative might occasionally do something right, like oppose Trump, that does not magically transform them into good people™ worth elevating or supporting.

One last thing: I’ve seen a lot of Biden supporters get all caught up in their feelings because Jon Stewart made fun of (gasp) Biden’s age. Listen: WE are not the ones who are in a cult! It is 100% okay for voters to joke about and criticize people in power. It’s MAGA who cannot criticize their dear leader, remember? It's the other guys, THE CULTISTS, who cannot accept even the lightest of criticisms.

“But Republicans will use it against us”

Yes, Republicans will use anything and everything against us, whether we said it or not. That’s what they dO. They lie, make shit up and try to use literally anything—true or false, good or bad—against non-Trump supporters. Being good and honest and not saying anything Republicans disagree with will not gain you any votes with Republicans.

Look, Idgaf about what Republicans and other people on the right think. About anything. Idc. Idgaf. Their opinions don’t matter and they aren’t going to change who I vote for in November 2024. I’m not worried about trying to change their hearts and minds, because they’re heartless and mindless.

At the end of the day, I dO think that msm tends to run with rightwing narratives, but once again, none of that foolishness will change my vote.

Put your grownup pants on and don’t get caught up in the drama.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rachel Bitecofer at The Cycle:

So many political science terms, so little time. As I meet with more and more people from the upper tiers of Democratic Party politics it is becoming clear to me that there are key findings from peer-reviewed political science research that simply never trickled down to the general public. Long time subscribers to this distinguished ‘Stack should know two of those political science concepts well by now: 1. the strength of party identification on public opinion and vote choice for the vast majority of the electorate and 2. the stunningly low levels of civic knowledge of American voters. Today, I want to talk about a third concept known as the Overton window. What is the Overton Window? Put simply, the Overton Window refers to what is considered acceptable in a political culture. For example, once upon a time it was considered unacceptable to plot a coup and call a mob to attack the Capitol to hold onto power after losing reelection. In fact, prior to Trump’s 2016 run, something as insignificant as having a campaign trail Baby Mama was seen as disqualifying for the presidency. The first time Elon Musk tweeted about the Overton Window it became clear to me that smart people had made this a core objective of his purchase of Twitter. Could the world’s richest man using the world’s largest megaphone redefine what is acceptable in American politics? Early in his reign as the arbiter of truthiness, Elon was focused on moving the Overton Window on transgenderism. When he purchase Twitter in 2022, just two weeks before the 2022 midterms, one of the first changes to the platform Elon ordered were to remove protections against misgendering people. He was also interested in normalizing the discourse of the alt-Right, bringing previously fringe shit like the Great Replacement Theory into the mainstream of Republican politics.

Again, Great Replacement Theory is the argument that Latinos and other non-White immigrants are migrating to America in order to take control of the country away from White people. Through algorithm manipulations and the unmatched power of an Elon RT, over the course of the last 3 years I’ve watched as rhetoric once confined to neo-Nazi meetings became popular policy appeals on the Right. And Elon saw the true power of his new platform. Since then, Elon has used his megaphone to push the Overton Window open on a host of things including getting Republican voters to accept things like DOGE, pushing Republicans to abandon Ukraine, and most recently, to get Republican voters to accept destroying our checks and balances system by discrediting the courts.

Rachel Bitecofer wrote on Substack about far-right co-”President” Elon Musk’s widening of the Overton Window to make far-right subject matter mainstream.

[correctopinionhaver]

not now kitten daddy's busy shifting the overton window

[emo-space-queen]

idk what liberal needs to hear this but you actually DON’T have to debate everyone. there are people out there who literally do not have a valid point. engaging in debate with them makes them think their point is now valid. i don’t debate human rights. if you disagree that trans people deserve to live, i’m not debating you on that because you’re OBJECTIVELY WRONG and your “point” isn’t worth considering.

go follow crutchesandspice everywhere you can and look up the overton window.

[rainbowpopeworld]

This and the Cassandra-like pointing out of where we are heading are the summary of my political existence

[beardedmrbean]

Gangland shootings and bombings that have plagued Sweden's biggest cities have spread to quieter suburbs and towns, shattering its reputation as a safe and peaceful nation.

Half an hour north of central Stockholm, Upplands-Bro features lakeside boat clubs, copper-red wooden villas and apartments flanked by pine and spruce trees.

But a 14-year-old boy was found dead in a forest here in August, and since January there have been several shootings and bombings targeting houses and apartments.

"It's awful. We've [been] woken up by explosions in the neighbourhood and it's scary," says 42-year-old Anna Petterson, who lives in Bro and has three children. "It's very much something that we're aware of, and we talk about a lot, and are afraid of."

Sweden has been a European hotspot for gang-related shootings and bombings for several years. But recently the violence has shifted beyond low-income, vulnerable urban areas and police say one reason is that gang members are increasingly targeting rivals' relatives.

Detectives suspect some of the latest violence has been organised by criminal leaders based in other countries, including Turkey and Serbia.

More than 50 people have been killed in shootings so far in 2023, and there have been more than 140 explosions. Last year, more than 60 people died in gun violence, the highest number on record.

"What started out as gun violence between young gangs looking to defend their territory has turned into a vicious circle of firearms trafficking and gun violence," explains Nils Duquet, a firearms researcher based at the Flemish Peace Institute in Brussels.

"Gangs have also matured and are no longer just the street criminals, but are often connected to higher-level criminals as well."

Innocent bystanders are also among the dead.

In September, a 70-year-old man and another man aged 20 were killed in a pub shooting in Sandviken in central Sweden, and a newly graduated teacher, 24, died in an explosion just outside the university city of Uppsala.

Soon afterwards Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson gave a rare national address admitting that "no other country in Europe" was experiencing this sort of situation, and promising tougher penalties for deadly violence.

Evin Cetin, an author and lawyer who has represented teenage shooting victims and suspects, says boys as young as 13 or 14 are being recruited by gangs, often through social media promises of money and designer clothes.

"Children are using their own bags not to carry books, but they carry the drug markets in Sweden on their own shoulders," she tells the BBC on a visit to Upplands-Bro, part of a nationwide schools tour to more than a dozen areas affected by gang crime.

Others are trying to tackle the problem by organising street patrols in areas affected by drugs and violence.

"That we're out and go around chatting with our kids and young people - it increases safety," says Libaane Warsame, during a night walk in Jarva, northern Stockholm, on a wet, windy Friday night.

Jarva looks like a lot of Swedish suburbs, with well-maintained apartment blocks, a few shops, and a nearby forest. The main difference is that it is more multicultural than many neighbourhoods, and it has Stockholm's highest unemployment rate.

Mr Warsame began patrolling the streets after his 19-year-old son - who police say was not in a gang - was killed in a shooting in December 2020.

"It's hard for [young people] to sit at home for hours without any income, any work. So they go out and stand around and there's a big risk that they will be recruited."

He also runs an organisation that supports families who have lost loved ones in deadly violence.

This year there have not been any fatal shootings in Jarva, but many locals say they remain on edge.

"I haven't been outside so late… because I don't want to make my mum worried," says Gizem Kuzucu, 17.

She often spends her evenings studying at Framtidens Hus, a youth centre, and says none of her friends have been in trouble with the law. But she has been exposed to crime on social media.

"I've seen a lot of videos on TikTok [in which] people are, like, talking about crime. They are like saying 'follow me on Instagram, I'm gonna post like a rapper that got killed'."

Another teenager at the youth centre, Libaan, says he grew up around older criminals and "did commit a few crimes" when he was younger.

"Kids here, they are really, really mean to each other…they don't know how to speak about their emotions, so what they do instead is that they lash out," says the 18-year-old.

Swedish police do not currently map gang members' nationalities, but research for the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention in 2021 showed young people born in Sweden to two parents from abroad were overrepresented as suspects in murder cases and robberies.

The right-wing coalition government, elected in September 2022, believes the rise in gang violence in recent years is directly connected to Sweden's earlier immigration policies. Until 2016, it had one of the most generous asylum laws in Europe.

"We can now see that 'outsideship' and lack of integration, in combination with trade of narcotics and organised crime is creating this very, very toxic mixture," Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told the BBC in September.

The government wants to make it harder for immigrants from outside the European Union to get social benefits, and to make preschool compulsory for children with two foreign parents in some areas, in order to improve Swedish-language skills.

Earlier this year, it became an offence to recruit children to participate in criminal activities. Stop-and-search zones are set to be introduced in early 2024 and ministers want to double prison sentences for offences including gun crimes and explosions.

The BBC was not granted a government interview to discuss these plans, despite multiple requests.

At the state-funded Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, researcher Klara Hradilova-Selin believes tackling gang crime "should have been a more important issue earlier" for previous coalitions on both the right and left of the political spectrum.

"There are colleagues of mine who were actually warning like decades ago [about] this kind of development of growing marginalisation in the deprived areas."

Worries about how gang conflicts are impacting the country's international image are also growing. "Sweden has always been viewed as an extremely safe country. Maybe one of the top safe countries in the world. And this image is falling apart," says Hradilova-Selin.

According to a recent survey for the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, eight out of 10 Swedish companies questioned believe it will get harder to attract foreign talent, investment and visitors due to the ongoing violence.

At Framtidens Hus youth centre, teenagers are being offered the chance to drive, dance and make podcasts. Former criminal Libaan says he would like a job that involves writing, or helping others, but he believes his future is also dependent on how he is treated by other Swedes.

"I don't feel included in the culture even though I'm born here. They kind of see me as this ghetto kid who has no future."