2 days Ago By Rachel Louise Snyder
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 alarm for 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.
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