Ben was 13 when he fell down one of the internet’s many rabbit holes. His family had recently moved to another country and he felt distant from his friends, isolated and insecure. YouTube became a source of comfort: when he wasn’t outside mountain biking, he was killing time watching videos that seemed to offer him easy solutions to his unhappiness.
While some of the videos began fairly benignly, he says they began to prey on his anxieties and channel them into misogyny. “I was pubescent, insecure about my body image,” says Ben, now 21 and studying in London. “Like other boys around me I was feeling frustrated. I started seeing videos asking questions about why men are unhappy.”
The content he consumed focused on “intimate things that spoke to your insecurities”, he remembers. In some ways, parts of the messaging he came across online, including in memes, “was quite helpful – that you are deserving of love,” he says. “But it pointed me in the wrong direction – that [my unhappiness] was the fault of feminism.”
For a couple of years in his early teens, Ben held views that he has now done a “complete 180” away from. He would watch videos with titles such as “Feminist destroyed in argument” and feel vindicated in his positions. He now sees that those clips only showed a partial view. “I felt ‘I’m the rational one here’. It started snowballing from there.”
In the end, it was his father who pulled him out before he got in too deep. During long drives alone, the two of them would have “painful but constructive” discussions about his views. “In the car there was no opportunity to walk away, so I had to challenge how I was thinking about issues. My dad pointed me to systemic reasons rather than the easy answers I got off the internet. I was lucky that I had a strong paternal figure to do that for me – I’ve got other friends who don’t have someone to pull them out.”
Although Ben remembers having arguments with his older sister and mother about feminism, he says his anti-women bias at the time made him unreceptive – even though he now acknowledges that his mum’s arguments were not “qualitatively worse”. “It can be painful to let go of a worldview that offers comfort, Ben says. “When you’re so locked in that mindset, the difficulty in facing yourself … holds back a lot of guys from changing their minds. I felt like I had the rug torn out from underneath me.”
Several years on from Ben’s experiences online, teachers, parents and internet safety experts have expressed concern about the reach that misogynist influencers such as Andrew Tate have achieved among young men, and this week Labour pledged to help schools develop role models to provide a counterbalance. A recent survey found that 16- to 29-year-olds hold more negative views about feminism than men over 60.
Young women are also noticing divisive and extreme content clogging up their feeds. Elena Wolfson, 20, a student in Warwickshire, enjoys power lifting and follows a handful of fitness accounts on Instagram. Lately, she says, her Explore page has felt like an onslaught of misogyny and harmful narratives.
“There are some really extreme views,” Wolfson says. “I see this narrative to men about there being only one way to be a real man and the whole narrative of a ‘high-value man’ [an online slang term about a “traditionally masculine” man]. I’m pretty certain it’s related to the gym content I follow. And if you look at the comment section of any female influencer, there’ll be [comments] saying horrible stuff because she’s a woman. It’s impossible to avoid.”
Wolfson says the explosion of short-form video content, like that on TikTok, has changed her experience of being online. “The way things are communicated, with viral algorithms – that didn’t feel like a thing before. It felt more like I was in a corner of the internet that I inhabited – now anything can get shoved in your face.”
Especially on TikTok but also on YouTube and his Instagram Explore page, Emmanuel, 16, sees content about gender that he feels aims to “cause a separation between men and women”. “It might be a street interview, with questions like ‘should a man pay on the first date?’ or ‘how much would you expect your partner to earn, how tall should he be?’. The videos are popular and get seen by wide range of mostly young people who grow up thinking this is how people think, even if it’s just a loud minority.”
Emmanuel, from Manchester, says it was impossible to avoid Tate in secondary school, though he hears less about him now. “Last year people would be quoting Tate because he was very popular,” he says. “The more well-adjusted, the people who spoke to girls, didn’t take it as seriously.”
While misogyny is obviously not new, Lizzie Reeves, a senior policy manager at the online safety charity Internet Matters, says misogynistic content has become normalised online. “These views used to be confined to niche corners of the internet that you’d have to seek out. Now, they’re really in the mainstream.”
The rise of online misogyny is due to a “coalition of factors”, Reeves says. “We need to think about the success of misogynist influencers against a backdrop of financial insecurity, the pandemic, social isolation and huge mental health pressures. The success of these influencers lies in their ability to stoke insecurities – their diagnosis is misleading and harmful.” She says it is in the financial interest of these influencers “to cultivate a sense of crisis”.
As well as socioeconomic factors, short-form videos have been key to the growth of the “manosphere”, an online ecosystem of anti-feminist influencers and bloggers such as Tate, Reeves says. “That’s how they go about attaining virality – they’re very quickly viewed, liked and shared. It’s important to note that all engagement, especially in comments, is not all positive. But the algorithm doesn’t discern on type of engagement.” Shocking content that lacks nuance does well, she adds.
Misogynist influencers “know how to toe the line with different platforms’ content moderation policies,” Reeves says, adding that some reserve their more extreme content for smaller platforms and link out to them. While Tate has been banned from a number of platforms, there are countless others vying for the top spot. “For platforms, it’s a game of whack-a-mole – they deplatform one and get loads more. None are as big a name as Tate – but for young people already drawn in, it’s opened them up to a wider world of influencers.”
Dixie, 18, a London-based student, doesn’t use TikTok these days but says her Instagram is a minefield of hateful content. “I tend to see it more on Reels; when it first appeared, I thought it would be less toxic than TikTok” but that hasn’t been her experience, she says. “There’s so much sexism and racism that gets loads of views and comments. There’s a running joke online – don’t open comments on Reels.”
She says the content recommended to her ranges from conspiracy theories about feminism to promotion of raw meat diets. It works by provoking a reaction: “It gets recommended to you whatever your politics is, either to make you angry or go make you fall down the rabbit hole.”
Such content drives engagement by triggering powerful emotions. “Sometimes it’s what you don’t want to see. If you look through the comments, that will count as interaction … That makes you angry and makes you want to keep on scrolling until you see something you do agree with.”
These days, Ben is in a much better place. He’s at university, enjoys climbing in his free time and has a very different online life now. But he worries about teenagers today who are being exposed to harmful content, as “manosphere” influencers jostle to take Tate’s place.
“Algorithms were not as advanced then as they are now. I’m afraid to think what they’re showing people now.”
