There has been an alarming rise in alpha male culture, with one expert seeing Australian boys as young as 11 being heavily influenced by misogynistic social media content.
Psychologist Sahra O’Doherty said content such as that from rape-accused influencer Andrew Tate played on boys’ “insecurity about themselves”.
The “alpha male” is defined by his followers as the most powerful and successful male in any group, who takes charge and is hyper-masculine.
A study conducted by the Dublin City University (DCU) showed that social media algorithms reinforce the idea of male supremacy and misogynistic content.
The researchers set up ten experimental accounts on YouTube and TikTok and found that all male-identifying accounts were drowning in anti-feminist, masculinist and extremist content.
There has been an alarming rise in alpha male culture, with one expert seeing Australian boys as young as 11 being heavily influenced by misogynistic social media content (stock)
This happened regardless of whether the content was searched, and accounts received this within the first 23 minutes of the experiment.
If the account showed any interest, the amount of this type of content increased dramatically.
After 400 videos, the study found that the majority of content pushed to the accounts fell into the manosphere genre (alpha male and anti-feminist).
As well as content promoting female submissiveness, anti-equality, male motivation, mental health and money-making, it also appeared to target boys’ emotional and financial insecurities.
This kind of targeting by the algorithm comes as no surprise to Sahra O’Doherty, president of the Australian Association of Psychologists, who said such content played on men’s “insecurity about themselves”.
“What we often see as psychologists is young men feeling quite lost, feeling like they don’t belong or don’t belong,” she said.
‘Or they’ve had negative experiences with friendship groups or with people they want to date, often women, and they feel the need to improve themselves.
“The alpha bro marketing that is shown to these young men plays on the idea that if you have this particular product you will perform better in the gym and excel at dating and have all these wonderful things that I’m going to let you can see it in this video.’
Psychologist Sahra O’Doherty (pictured) said content like that from rape-accused influencer Andrew Tate played on boys’ ‘insecurity about themselves’
Ms O’Doherty works with young men and teenagers and notes that the largest group she believes is influenced by this content is high school students.
‘I see this a lot among high school students and there has been a lot of research showing that this is quite a problem. It is often accompanied by misogynistic attitudes or the penetration of traditional stereotypical gender roles,” she says.
“And it can often lead to not having healthy conversations or relationships with young women.” And in extreme cases, it can cause these young men to withdraw from conversations (and) from society.”
Ms O’Doherty said she also sees the behavior in primary school-aged boys.
‘It’s getting younger and younger. We start seeing that from late primary school age onwards,” she said.
Some of these teens see influencers like Andrew Tate as role models.
Influencer Andrew Tate (photo) and his brother Tristan have been accused of rape and human trafficking in Romania, which they deny
Tate and his brother Tristan have been accused of rape and human trafficking in Romania, which they deny.
“It’s this aspirational image of people like Andrew Tate, where you see someone you see as successful or rich or handsome, surrounded by women or nice cars,” Ms O’Doherty said.
“If you scroll through TikTok, or if you scroll through Instagram, there are a lot of people touting themselves as dating coaches or lifestyle coaches.
“And they really fixate on this idea of hyper-masculine, really old-fashioned stereotypical views of masculinity.”
Ms O’Doherty said young boys “if they get sucked into a culture like that, it can be very problematic to get them out of that and help them work on themselves and their self-esteem.”
Despite social media platforms shutting down and removing the accounts of these types of influencers, the DCU found that it had not removed the content itself.
“Our research shows that closing influencers’ accounts does not necessarily remove their content,” said Professor Debbie Ging.
“The overwhelming presence of Andrew Tate content in our dataset at a time when he was deplatformed means that social media companies must tackle harmful content in more sophisticated ways.”
Ms O’Doherty advises parents to have ‘very honest and open conversations’ with their children and leave judgment at the door.
“When we have these conversations, we can talk about the things they may be exposed to on social media without fear of judgment,” she said.
“We’re not going to condemn them for watching or engaging in the kinds of things they engage in, but we might want to discuss some of the messages that they’re putting forth when they watch these TikToks.”