Hitchhiker's Guide to the Manosphere
A project by two teenagers - perhaps to change the world for the better?
So, what are we doing here?
That's a great question! The whole purpose of this project is to eliminate manosphere content from the lives of young adolescent boys. Since this isn't realistically possible, as nothing on the internet can be removed or deleted entirely, we decided to find a way to make eliminating this kind of content easier. But before we get to explaining fun stuff like that, let's start with the elephant in the room: what exactly is manosphere content? Manosphere content is a collection of online communities and materials that focus on topics related to masculinity, often promoting polarized and harmful narratives about gender roles. These spaces frequently include ideologies like men's rights activism, pickup artistry, or anti-feminism, and can sometimes escalate into promoting misogyny or extreme views about women and relationships. While some content may claim to offer advice or self-improvement for men, much of it reinforces toxic stereotypes that can negatively influence young audiences. And this is where we come in - to prove this to you!
Now that that's out of the way, let's get into more details about our project. Manosphere content usually targets boys/men, and can tend to harm their mental health. For example, if one guy is watching a video and the content creator in the video is 'ripped', then he will feel bad about his own body image and will feel the need to change himself. This type of content not only affects boys, but they can affect girls (e.g. 'women belong in the kitchen', 'women don't need to consent if a man wants sex') and genderqueer people (e.g. 'being gay/transgender is wrong', 'gay people are sick'). However, our primary aim is how it affects adolescent boys, but we want to include a small study on girls and genderqueer people as well. Amélie has been working on the research side of things; she made a survey studying the effects of this kind of content on secondary school students across Ireland, and has been analysing these results carefully and reading up on these kind of effects as well. If you want to read more about her research, you can take a look at our available resources above!
So, with all the data we collected, and all the research gathered, there is one big quesiton that remains: how do we plan on solving this problem? Well I (Beatrice) have been working on a web extension to filter this kind of content. I have explained this more in-depth in the provided resources above, but let me give you some brief details. I have created a simple web extension, which for the timebeing is only available on the Chrome web store, which consists only of a script constantly running in the background of every website you visit. What this script does is go through every word on some article, video caption, or anything that's similar, and checks if any of these words are keywords relating to the manosphere. If some word is a keyword or even phrase relating to the manosphere, you will get a white page instead of the content meant to be seen, telling you that the content has been blocked, why it has been blocked, and it provides a link to this very website - if you're still not completely sure as to why this content has been blocked for you and how it harms you.
Like a lot of things though, there is a margin for error. Educational and/or harmless and legitimate content can be blocked. At the time of writing this, I can't quite get to the most advanced bits of how content filtering works. As much as I understand it, and for the hours I have researched it for, I simply do not have all the time and resources needed to make this extension 'perfect'. So, consider this a starting point - like a prototype, if you will! It does exactly what I wanted to, so in the future, when I will want to implement fancy stuff like APIs, image/video processing tricks, and even some machine learning, I will have a base - and this extension will hopefully make a great difference in the world! As mentiioned previously, you can feel free to look around at our resources and other things if you're interested in this project, or even just certain parts of it. Thank you for reading this, and if there's one thing you've learned from this, it's to stay safe out there!