CultNEWS101 Articles: 4/30/2026

[Patrick Ryan]

Bratslavers in Yavne’el, Children of God, Digital Cults

The Times of Israel: Hasidic sect in northern Israel churns out child brides and conceals sex abuse — report

"Hundreds of families from an insular Hasidic sect in northern Israel are systematically marrying off girls as young as 12 to husbands who are not much older, as welfare services fail them and community members fear speaking out, Haaretz reported Thursday.

The report cited current and former members of the Bratslav community in Yavne’el, officials with knowledge of the matter, and the previously unpublished findings of a government panel established in 2023 to look into the closed community.

The panel that looked into the community reportedly found “cases that give rise to suspected crime,” “multiple cases of dysfunctional parenting,” and “sexual abuse, part of which goes unreported.”

“It’s straight-up rape,” said a current community member quoted by Haaretz. “Nobody asks a 14-year-old girl if she wants to get married. A year later she’s taking a baby to the playground.”

According to the government panel, the weddings are mainly between children aged 15-17, who are taught from an early age to get married young.

“The community perpetuates and is permeated by a religious and cultural outlook that says early marriages of minors are desirable and, among other things, help keep youth away from various dangers,” said the government report, without elaborating, according to Haaretz.

The newspaper cited current and former community members as saying the “dangers” that the community fears are non-procreative seminal emissions, which are prohibited in halacha, or Jewish ritual law.

Current community members agreed to speak only on the side of the road, far away from the town, and were wary of approaching cars, Haaretz said. It quoted one female community member as saying, 'Whoever talks risks ruining their and their family’s lives.'"

Dear Media: She Didn’t Realize She Grew Up in a Cult Until She Saw It on the News

"If you’ve ever fallen down a cult documentary rabbit hole at 2 a.m. and thought “how does someone survive that and come out the other side functioning,” Daniella Mestyanek Young is your answer. She was born third generation into the Children of God, one of the most notorious cults in modern history, and spent the first 15 years of her life inside it. Today she’s a bestselling author, a Harvard-trained organizational psychologist, and a US Army veteran who has become the go-to voice on how coercive control actually works—not just in cults, but in everyday life."

Nippon: Twisted Media Perception Leads to Birth of “Digital Cults”

"Japanese political commentator Yoneshige Katsuhiro identifies the cult-like tactics of online influencers, who maintain control over their followers based on the idea that the group is good and outsiders are bad."

"...The unseen hand spreading ... information is the platform algorithm, which only recommends posts that match the users’ existing opinions. Users end up part of a crowd trapped in a massive echo chamber. Then, when the influencers leading that crowd spread insidious attacks on those with other viewpoints, or on the media itself, the crowd rallies behind them in a greater frenzy. Truly, the term “dog whistle” is apt.

Mental health professional and academic Steven Hassan offers up a model of authoritarian control shared by many modern cults that he calls BITE, standing for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion. Key elements are minimizing access to outside information and emotional control through a rejection of external criticism based on values that the group is good and outsiders are bad.

This model bears a striking resemblance to the methods of influencers who develop their business by targeting groups through hostile media perception and conspiracy theories. They create massive echo chambers within a digital information space, which naturally cuts off other information sources. They then control their crowd and use it to attack critics, ending up with what can only be called a “digital cult.”

Humans are prisoners of confirmation bias, the need to continue to believe what they already believe. These digital cults are born from a synergy of human psychology and technology, so there seems to be no end in sight to their continued growth. But we can take action to ensure we are not swallowed up ourselves.

The first step is to avoid consuming reports based on personal comfort and their proximity to our opinions, and then seek to separate fact from opinion and consider the information’s reliability when we use it. That would seem to be the decisive point."

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