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.”
