Misogynistic social media content is turning Aussie boys as young as 11-years-old into 'alpha males'

There has been an alarming rise in alpha male culture, with one expert seeing Australian boys as young as 11-years-old becoming 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 its followers as the most powerful and successful man in any group, who takes charge and is hyper masculine. 

A study conducted by the Dublin City University (DCU) showed that social media algorithms are amplifying the notion of male supremacy and misogynistic content.

The researchers set up 10 experimental accounts on YouTube and TikTok and found all of the male-identifying accounts were drowned in anti-feminist, masculinist and extremist content.

This happened regardless of whether the content was sought out, and the 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 the majority of the content being pushed to the accounts fell into the manosphere (alpha male and anti-feminist) genre.

Besides the content that promoted the submission of women, anti-equality, male motivation, mental health and money-making, it was found to target boys' emotional and financial insecurities.

This type of targeting by the algorithm doesn't come as a surprise to President of the Australian Association of Psychologists Sahra O'Doherty, who said such content played on men's 'insecurity about themselves'.

'What we're often seeing as psychologists are young men who are feeling quite lost, they don't feel like they belong or they don't fit in,' she said.

'Or they've had negative experiences with friendship groups or with people that they're wanting to date, often women, and they feel the need to improve themselves.

'The alpha bro marketing that is being shown to these young men is playing into that idea that if you have this particular product, then you will exceed in the gym and excel at dating and have all of these wonderful things that I'm going to show you in this video.'

Ms O'Doherty works with young men and teenagers and notes the biggest group she's seeing impacted by this content is high school-aged kids.

'I see this a lot in high schoolers and there's a lot of research around this being quite an issue. It's often coupled with misogynistic attitudes or pushing those traditional stereotypical gender roles,' she said.

'And it can often result in not engaging in healthy conversations or relationships with young women. And it can in the extremes result in these young men withdrawing from conversations (and) from society.'

Ms O'Doherty said she's also seeing the behaviour from primary school-aged boys. 

'It's getting younger and younger. We're starting to see that from even late primary school age,' she said.

Some of these teens see influencers such as Andrew Tate as role models. 

Tate and his brother Tristan have been charged with rape and human trafficking in Romania, which they deny.

'It's this aspirational image of people like Andrew Tate, where you see somebody who you might perceive as being successful or wealthy or good looking surrounded by women or nice cars,' Ms O'Doherty said.

'If you scroll through TikTok, or if you scroll through Instagram, there's a lot of people who tout themselves as being dating coaches or lifestyle coaches. 

'And they really fixate on this idea of hyper masculine, really old school stereotypical views of masculinity.'

Ms O'Doherty said of young boys 'get sucked into that sort of culture, then it can be really problematic to try to extract them from that and help them to work on themselves and their own self esteem.'

Despite social media platforms shutting down and removing the accounts of these type of influencers, the DCU found that it didn't remove the content itself.

'Our study shows that shutting down influencers' accounts does not necessarily remove their content,' Professor Debbie Ging said.

'The overwhelming presence of Andrew Tate content in our dataset at a time when he was de-platformed means that social media companies must tackle harmful content in more sophisticated ways.' 

Ms O'Doherty recommends parents having 'really honest and open conversations' with their children and leave judgement at the door. 

'When we're having these conversations, we can talk about the kinds of things that they might be exposed to on social media without fear of judgment,' she said.

'We're not going to judge them for watching or engaging in the kind of things that they are engaging with, but we do want to discuss maybe some of the messages that they are lapping up when they're watching these TikToks.'