Misogynistic content still being fed to teens online

Teenage boys are continuing to be exposed to misogynistic content on social media, despite not actively seeking it out. The unwanted content, often linked to the manosphere, is being fed to them through algorithms that prioritize engagement and controversy.

Eighteen-year-old Zac Roebig says his social media feed is mostly filled with music-related content, but he occasionally encounters videos promoting the manosphere. "It's sometimes hard to disconnect from it," Zac said. "Politics is everywhere."

"I know it's been put there to keep me on there, make me angry, make me interact with it. It makes you share the content, argue with it, comment on it, argue in the comments."

Zac says he never searches for the content and isn't sent it by friends, but his age and gender mean it continues to appear on his feed. "The whole manosphere thing … 'I need to have 10 wives, they need to be in the kitchen and can't vote', whether you actually agree with it or not, a lot of people find it funny because it's shocking," he said.

Professor Dan Angus, director of QUT's Digital Media Research Centre, describes "manosphere" content as "content that has toxic attitudes towards women, and toxic attitudes towards those young men themselves".

According to UN Women, manosphere content often opposes feminism and represents men as victims of the current social and political climate. One of the best-known examples is controversial online personality Andrew Tate, who urges men to exercise absolute authority over their female partners.

Social media platforms, including Meta and TikTok, have banned Tate, as well as content that promotes or glorifies him. However, teenagers say they continue to encounter misogynistic content on their feeds.

Seventeen-year-old twins William and Connor Faulds say they never search for manosphere content, but it still appears on their feeds. "Even though I haven't searched it, it just comes up … and after that, if I watch the full video, it just comes up again and again," Connor said.

Professor Angus says this is not surprising, as social media algorithms prioritize content that generates engagement. "Once you get enough of these young men watching this content, then that gives signals to these systems that it may do well in front of the rest of that audience," he said.

Dr Chang Liu, a research fellow at QIMR Berghofer Institute, says her research has found that content marketed as self-improvement can rapidly lead users down an extremist rabbit hole. "So, the researchers make fake accounts, pretend to be males, and the search began with normal gym, fitness, workouts," she said.

"They eventually discovered the feed led into outrage like anti-feminist content quite quickly. By the end of the experiment, on average, over 70 per cent of the content was considered anti-feminist."

Dr Liu says negative content can also hold users' attention for longer than neutral or positive content. "Due to evolution, something we perceive as a threat, danger, are always at a higher attentional priority."

A recent Melbourne University study found that boys aged 13 to 17 are the most likely to hold hostile attitudes toward women. Professor Angus says social media is not wholly to blame for increasingly misogynistic attitudes, and that the home environment also plays a critical role.

"A lot of the research points to the home environment being one of the most critical here, as well," he said. "How do we adjust those home environments, so those young boys are seeing positive role models in their lives — who believe in equality and believe that a free and fair society involves all of its members?"

The federal government has introduced laws that would make social media giants provide an option to "opt out" of the algorithm, but Professor Angus says it's not that simple. "We can't really turn the algorithms of social media off completely, because algorithms are through the entire experience — from moderating harmful content … to the recommender systems, which drive the order of content within our feeds," he said.