The Big Tech Show: The manosphere – the growing trend of algorithms recommending toxicity to young men

The Big Tech Show

Are social media platforms unduly skewing the minds of young males? What is the harmful content they see? And is it unprompted?

On The Big Tech Show this week, Adrian is joined by postdoctoral researcher with the Observatory on Cyberbullying, Cyberhate & Online Harassment at DCU Anti-Bullying Centre, Dr Catherine Baker.

Dr Baker is an author of a recent report by Dublin City University���s Anti Bullying Centre. The study recorded content recommended to 10 experimental accounts on 10 blank smartphones - five on YouTube Shorts and five on TikTok. All accounts were fed masculinist, anti-feminist and other extremist content within the first 23 minutes of the experiment.

Overall, YouTube Shorts recommended a larger amount of toxic content (61.5% of the total content) than TikTok accounts (34.7%). The content featuring ‘Manfluencers’ (male influencers) accounted for the majority of videos. By far the most prevalent of these was Andrew Tate, who featured 582 times on the YouTube Shorts accounts and 93 times on the TikTok accounts.

You can listen to the full episode here on the Irish Independent website or wherever you get your podcasts.