I posed as a 17-year-old boy on social media. It took 13 minutes to be shown the manosphere

Thirteen minutes of scrolling on social media is all it took for my fake profile of 17-year-old Jaden Michael to be exposed to the manosphere content pipeline.

Toxic online content is increasingly linked to violent sexualised behaviour in young men . Last month, two separate groups of private school boys were charged over the alleged gang rape of girls . A 16-year-old Sydney girl died after a suspected act of strangulation during sex .

The government is considering banning porn which depicts choking alongside a crackdown on social media algorithms serving “rubbish” to children. On Wednesday, Teach Us Consent chief executive Chanel Contos used her National Press Club speech to call for better protection for boys from the manosphere, proposing opt-in algorithms and feeds limited exclusively to subscriber accounts.

Research from Dublin City University found it took just 23 minutes for a new male social media profile to be served misogynistic content. This masthead decided to replicate that 2024 experiment, spending an hour on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

Using a factory-reset phone set-up with a US-based e-SIM (which doesn’t require ID), I set up an account for 17-year-old Jaden Michael. For the first 30 minutes, I was a passive user. After that, I began linking videos and following users who promoted manosphere views.

TikTok was the worst offender, almost immediately promoting gender-war content.

The cycle continued, with more content from the three influencers. Interestingly, most gender-war content I was shown was presented by women.

Instagram was more reluctant to lead me down the pipeline. Instead of wanting me to rally against women, Instagram’s algorithm wanted me to join a church (perhaps due to the US-linked phone number) and get a girlfriend, but gave me happy relationship content. Couples were giggling, boys were getting their girlfriends flowers, and people were worshipping together.

It wasn’t until the 45-minute mark that Instagram recommended a pick-up artist account praising women who reject male attention as a sign of respect for their partners. Even after following several manosphere figures, Instagram’s feed remained largely filled with mainstream, non-extremist content.

It’s worth noting that last week, Meta, which owns Instagram, added algorithmic restrictions as part of a landmark $24 billion settlement in the US. During the trial, it was accused of fuelling the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children.

YouTube, owned by Google, was the worst offender in the 2024 university research. For “Jaden’s” algorithm, however, YouTube was the least offensive (though it served up the most ads – often every second reel – promoting mobile games).

At the 26-minute mark, it showed a reel asking, “which one contains more DNA, [OnlyFans creator] Bonnie Blue or the Omnitrix [a watch that can alter DNA in Cartoon Network’s show Ben 10].”

I then followed three manosphere influencers to see if that would change things.