There has been growing concern in recent years about the role of recommender algorithms in promoting extreme content to social media users. Anecdotal accounts from educators and parents suggest that boys, in particular, are being targeted by high-profile ‘manosphere’ influencers, often under the guise of advice on mental health or wealth accumulation. While social media have been amplifying anti-feminist men’s rights activists for some time, the growth of influencer culture on TikTok, in particular, has platformed a significant number of highly influential ideological entrepreneurs such as Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines and Sneako. This monetization of male insecurity not only serves to mainstream anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ ideology, but may also function as a gateway to fringe Far-Right and other extreme worldviews (Ribeiro et al., 2021; Brace et al., 2023).
Most social media companies do not disclose how their algorithms work, which presents challenges to researchers attempting to gather evidence on this phenomenon. In addition, there is some disagreement among academics regarding whether and to what extent recommender algorithms promote increasingly extreme content. This is mainly because we lack evidence on the experience of ‘real’, logged-in users traversing personalised algorithms based on viewing history. Finally, most research to date has focused on YouTube and long-form video content. Given the recent surge in popularity of short video content, evident in the rise of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, additional research is needed to explore how platform recommender algorithms function in these new format domains.
The study demonstrates that all of the male-identified accounts, whether they sought out gender-normative or manosphere-related content, were fed masculinist, anti-feminist and other extremist content and that, once the account showed interest by watching this sort of content, the amount rapidly increased. Our findings have significant implications for social media platform governance as well as for the development of educational and technological interventions for boys, men, parents and teachers to prevent radicalization into these ideologies.