Are boys being radicalised?
Research shows that adolescent boys and young men already face structural challenges, unemployment, economic instability, and mental ill-health during the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood (Carmichael-Murphy et al., 2022). Categorising young people as “NEET” (not in education, employment, or training) often misses these broader social determinants of health and wellbeing, which shape disengagement from education and work in the first place. When boys feel disconnected, unsupported, or unseen, it creates fertile ground for extremist narratives that promise belonging, purpose, or control.
So, are boys being radicalised to the right? The evidence increasingly suggests that they are, but it’s not as straightforward as pinning blame on one individual or one viral clip.
Andrew Tate has been given martyr status – his name carries a weight that other manospheric influencers do not. He is not the sole cause of teenage boys becoming disenfranchised within the community and within schools, and his name should not be the first thing that comes to our mind when we discuss the radicalisation of teenage boys. I remember the first time I saw Tate’s content; it was laughable, absurd even. But that’s the danger: humour disarms. It pulls you in, gets you to engage, and by the time the jokes stop being funny, the messages have already lodged themselves. Tate may loom large, but he is not alone. Influencers like HS TikkyTokky and Ed Matthews have emerged in the UK and Europe, presenting themselves as ordinary young men – going to the gym, partying, streaming, and joking, yet embedding misogyny and misogynoir in their content. This is a common theme amongst manospheric influencers – they seem like regular men – but better, with money, beautiful women and like they’re having the time of their life. This life is understandably enviable and attractive to boys and men who feel displeasure with their reality.
Even political figures like Nigel Farage have blurred the line between humour and politics; when he began offering personalised video messages on Cameo in 2022. It’s like your racist uncle doing personalised birthday shout-outs — but beneath the humour lay the same old xenophobic messaging. This is how the radicalisation machine works: through memes, banter, jokes. Misogyny and racism have always been there, but now they’re dressed up in irony, comedy, and algorithms.
This is what makes the manosphere effective: boys don’t need to seek out misogyny to find it. Gilmour (2025) traces the manosphere’s roots back over 50 years, but its digital spread is unprecedented. Mamié, Ribeiro, and West (2021) analysed 300 million online posts and found that auto-suggestions online pushed users deeper into extreme alt-right content. Baker, Ging, and Brandt Andresen (2024) showed that teenage boys searching innocuous content like #gymtips were led to manosphere spaces just as quickly as those searching for explicitly misogynistic hashtags such as #redpill. Misogyny is digitally adjacent to aspiration: fitness, wealth, luxury cars. What looks harmless at first glance soon opens doors to radicalisation.
The manosphere has appealed to my humour before. The manosphere has appeared to me before. The manosphere has seemed innocent to me before. So, imagine being a 13-year-old boy alone in your room with nothing but those videos gradually getting more radical. Adolescence itself is a risk factor, but when layered with social disconnection, family dysfunction, poverty, or inequality, the likelihood of extremism increases (Campelo et al., 2018). Recruiters exploit these vulnerabilities with techniques recognisable from extremist movements: portraying feminism as an injustice (“feminism is a cancer”), spreading fear (“80% of women want to date 20% of men”), and glorifying isolation (“stay lonely to be successful”). Hope Not Hate’s 2023 survey revealed that only 26% of 16–17-year-old boys rejected one manosphere influencer’s ideas, while 45% viewed them positively.
At the same time, girls and boys are diverging in how they engage with gender and inequality. Ogden et al. (2025) found that girls often leave sports and extracurricular activities due to pressures to excel academically, concerns about body exposure in uniforms, stereotypes, and constant upward comparisons. Many later reflected that they wished they had focused on fun and friendship rather than competition. If you grow up measuring your worth against what your body looks like, or how you’re perceived by others, it makes sense that sport, something that should be joyful, becomes a site of anxiety. At the same time, it’s telling that boys don’t disengage in the same way. Instead, while girls are pushed into self-scrutiny, boys are being pulled into online spaces that inflate their confidence in harmful ways, pushing them towards victimhood narratives or misogyny rather than reflection.
Horeck et al. (2023) showed that during the pandemic, digital platforms became spaces for feminist consciousness-raising, with girls more likely to discuss sexual violence, while boys often disengaged from these conversations or adopted manosphere-like discourses around false rape accusations. Some boys expressed “defensive masculinity” and positioned themselves as victims, yet when given opportunities to discuss power and privilege openly, some progress was made in challenging these myths. That’s the contradiction we’re living with when boys are invited into these conversations in good faith, many are capable of empathy and change. But when they’re left to the echo chambers of the internet, defensive masculinity hardens into hostility.
This growing gender divide is political as well as cultural. Mathisen (2025) reports that the gender gap in left–right ideology among adolescents has doubled over the past decade, with more boys than ever believing gender equality has “gone too far.” To me, that statistic isn’t just about politics, it reflects a generational tug-of-war. Girls are being encouraged to speak out, to name sexual violence, to own their space, and that creates backlash. Boys see this empowerment and, rather than seeing it as a gain for everyone, they’re being told it’s a loss for them. The manosphere thrives on framing gender equality as a zero-sum game: if women win, men must be losing. Diepeveen (2024) notes that social media plays a role in shaping boys’ attitudes to gender equality, though not through simple cause-and-effect. Instead, boys are drawn into content that reflects pre-existing interests or group dynamics, with anonymity and platform design encouraging them to share views they believe align with peers. Sometimes this means amplifying risk-taking or sexist views, but it can also create space for pro-feminist voices, if the environment supports it. That’s why I don’t think social media itself is the enemy, it’s about who gets to set the tone. If peer groups reward misogyny, boys will perform misogyny. If they reward empathy, boys are capable of showing empathy. The issue is that right now, misogyny is louder, slicker, and far more algorithmically amplified.
What all of this shows is that radicalisation is not inevitable, but the pipeline exists and it is powerful. Increased screen time during lockdown intensified this tension between “networked popular feminism” and “popular misogyny” (Horeck et al., 2023), and without intervention, the misogynistic side continues to spread quickly. Regehr (2020) describes this as an “echo chamber effect” where repeated exposure to violent content normalises it as fixed belief. Masculinity itself, as Horeck and colleagues argue, often operates through fear, fear of being exposed as inadequate, fear of being seen as a fraud, which makes exaggerated performances of masculinity online all the more enticing.
Masculinity under the manosphere is built on fear: fear of being weak, of being exposed, of being a fraud. The manosphere doesn’t just exploit this fear, it monetises it. It sells boys a version of masculinity that is impossible to achieve, then blames women or feminism for their inevitable failure. Online, the exaggerated performance of masculinity feels like an antidote, but it’s a performance that never ends. The likes, the shares, the memes — it all feeds a cycle where humour curdles into resentment, and resentment curdles into radicalisation.
So, are boys being radicalised? Yes, and increasingly at younger ages. But this is not irreversible, and the villain is not just Andrew Tate, or even the manosphere itself. The real danger lies in the invisible pipeline of anger, fear, and isolation that finds boys before we do. Not every boy who laughs at Tate or scrolls through manosphere content becomes entrenched. Supportive peer groups, digital literacy, and proactive interventions can make the difference. What matters is recognising that the radicalisation pipeline is invisible to many parents, teachers, and communities, it happens on networks they cannot see.
Yes, boys are being radicalised. But the villain is not just Andrew Tate, or even the manosphere itself. The real danger lies in the invisible pipeline of anger, fear, and isolation that finds boys before we do.
This is why Dawn Intelligence exists.
By tracking and predicting harmful trends in real time, tailoring insights to local contexts, and equipping schools, workplaces, and policymakers with practical tools, we aim to spot danger before it escalates. Radicalisation thrives in silence and shadows, but through data, context, and compassionate intervention, it can be disrupted. Our mission is not to criminalise boys, but to understand the pressures and pathways that draw them in, and to provide educators and communities with strategies that counteract them.
