🌅 How Quickly Social Media Pushes Toxic Content to Young Men

SOURCE

DCU Anti-Bullying Center

WHAT TO KNOW

• To test the type of content social media platforms feed to new accounts, researchers at Dublin City University in Ireland used 10 blank smartphones to create 10 “sockpuppet” accounts—which interact with content in a way that mimics a real user—on YouTube and TikTok, finding that each of the male-identified accounts were fed far-right masculinist, anti-feminist, and other extremist content upon joining, regardless of the type of content the account actually sought out. The team also found the male-identified accounts received the “alpha-male” content within the first 23 minutes of joining the platform.

WHY IT MATTERS

• The study found the vast majority of content being recommended to the accounts was categorized as toxic and most often fell into the category of alpha-male content, like videos railing against equality or promoting different ways to make money. The content is especially problematic as it plays on boys’ emotional and financial insecurity, often while simultaneously downplaying the importance of mental health treatment or therapy.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The study aligns with other research using sockpuppet accounts on social media, including an experiment using 100,000 such accounts by researchers at the University of California, Davis that found YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is pushing extremist content to right-leaning users. The team found 40% of right-leaning sockpuppet accounts received recommendations from channels promoting extremist ideas like white nationalism or the Q-Anon conspiracy theory, compared to 32% of centrist and left-leaning accounts.