'Manosphere' messaging "plays into young men’s insecurities around their bodies... as well as their future success and their relationships". Illustration / Mattis Dovier, The New York Times
'Manosphere' messaging "plays into young men’s insecurities around their bodies... as well as their future success and their relationships". Illustration / Mattis Dovier, The New York Times
Opinion by Rachel Louise Snyder
Rachel Louise Snyder is a professor of literature and journalism at American University and a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of 'No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us' and 'Women We Buried, Women We Burned'.
The horrifying scenario depicted in new Netflix series Adolescence is entirely plausible.
Last year, researchers at Dublin City University released a report on a disturbing phenomenon: a surge of male supremacy videos in young men’s social media feeds. It’s the kind of report that should sound an alarmfor parents, teachers and administrators. But as the gender divide widens and young men increasingly lean conservative amid Trump-era authoritarianism, it feels less like a future warning and more like a current diagnosis.
In the report, researchers created sock-puppet accounts – fake accounts registered as teenage boys – to determine how quickly misogynistic videos show up in users’ TikTok and YouTube feeds. Alongside a control group, one group used male-coded search terms, such as “gaming” or “gym tips”, while another searched for more extreme anti-feminist, male-supremacist content. The “manosphere”, as it is often referred to, includes videos by Andrew and Tristan Tate, influencers who profit off the insecurities of young men. (The Tate brothers are embroiled in criminal and civil cases in Romania, Britain and the United States. They deny the allegations against them.)
It took under nine minutes for TikTok to offer troubling content to their fake 16-year-old boys, which later included explicitly anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ videos. Much of the content blamed women and trans people for the standing they believe men have lost in the world. More extreme content appeared within 23 minutes. Male supremacy videos intersected with reactionary right-wing punditry within two or three hours.
By the final phase of the experiment, accounts that showed even slight interest in the manosphere – for instance, accounts that watched a video all the way through – resulted in their For You feeds offering more than 78% alpha-male and anti-feminist content. Messages included: feminism has gone too far, men are losing out on jobs to women and women prefer to stay at home rather than work.
Catherine Baker, the lead author of the study, says this messaging resonates because it plays into young men’s insecurities around their bodies – many of the accounts glorify fitness – as well as their future success and their relationships. Young men might believe that in order to be successful, they can’t show vulnerability; they need wealth, six-pack abs and social, political and cultural dominance.
Many manosphere accounts openly call for women to be subjugated and subordinate to men. Andrew Tate, for example, has publicly stated that if a girlfriend doesn’t accept cheating, “that’s when you start hitting her and being abusive”. Tate has said that he will choose his daughters’ husbands, and “she’ll end up pregnant at 21 like she’s supposed to be”.
“I don’t think that young women should be making their own choices about who their lifelong partners are,” he said.
The implications of such views do not stay online. “We’re in a very pivotal time right now where this kind of manosphere, more fringe ideologies are being mainstreamed to much larger platforms than ever before,” Baker told me.
Another study, from The Open University in Britain, surveyed more than 7800 adults and found that 15% of women had experienced online violence against them; 13% of women said the abuse progressed to physical violence. Another report tracked online misogynistic content in 47 US states and identified a geographic overlap between online misogyny and incidents of domestic and family violence.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the founder of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University (and my colleague), studies the trajectory of online violence to real-world violence, and offers digital literacy guides for administrators, teachers and parents. She and other researchers believe such lessons should start as early as elementary school. “We just throw our kids to the wolves algorithmically, and expect them to recognise and reject it,” she said. “But we need to do a better job of helping those kids and parents understand what they’re seeing.”
The new Netflix mini-series Adolescence grapples with this. In it, a 13-year-old boy named Jamie Miller appears to have killed his female classmate. His parents are good people and engaged in their child’s life but are tortured by what they chose to ignore. The father tried to toughen up his son, forcing him to play sports even though Jamie struggled. He ignored his son’s love of drawing and how quickly the internet could turn vile. Jamie’s parents buy him a computer and a headset and believe he is safe because he is at home, in his room.
Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty in 'Adolescence'. Photo / Netflix
This is what parents so often think. At home, our children will be safe. Our proximity equals security. It may be fictional, but Adolescence nails the naïveté of this rationalisation.
There are at least four bills before Congress meant to address transparency in algorithms, limits on social media and similar measures. (Algorithms can serve anyone troubling content.) We regulate any number of things that pose dangers to our children: cars, toys, chemicals, alcohol. Any delay in cleaning up the online ecosystem is congressional malpractice.
Meanwhile, as Elon Musk’s shadowy team of tech bros move with abandon, site after site devoted to women’s health, safety, autonomy, accomplishments and work is being erased. The Office on Violence Against Women has withdrawn all funding opportunities for 2025 from its website. The White House’s Gender Policy Council is gone. At the same time, domestic violence agencies are suspending services or going bankrupt, and millions of dollars in federal funds to address teen dating violence, trafficking and stalking have been frozen.
We live in a new world, where words like ”women", “gender” and “trauma” are banned or limited in research studies. Phrases like “women are property” and “gay people are mentally ill” are no longer violations of conduct at Meta. The fringe went mainstream, and then became the US government. It appears that a Trump administration official intervened on behalf of the Tate brothers to bring them from Romania to the United States in February. The White House recently hosted Conor McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship star who was found liable for sexual assault in a civil trial in Ireland. Such activities might not be meaningful politically, but they certainly send a message. Trump, Musk, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and the manosphere share the same dark vision of the world: that in order to win, others have to lose.
After I finished Adolescence, I scrolled through Netflix’s suggestions of what to watch next. I was offered more series and films with the same central premise: a boy, a man or a group of men and a murdered girl. It felt like a cry in the wasteland of the internet, a chorus of stolen lives.
