Educate yourself, kids!
This is by far the best part of the website - depending on how much you like learning and all that! Here, you're about to journey through the hours of research we conducted to make this project happen, and how we got to the whole "making an extension" idea - and just how much longer we researched for to get it as perfect as we can! We hope you'll learn a lot, and also share the troubles and experiences we had in the making of this awesome project!
Disclaimer: this might be too interesting.
Before project work: how is this content bad?
As mentioned before, there was a crap-ton of research put into this project. But how come we assumed that this content is bad? What is our proof for this? Maybe there are good intents? Well, no - we have read countless surveys conducted (however not too many, shockingly, were available) which proved this. Reading all of these studies and surveys has led us to wonder; what if we created our own survey for people in Ireland? What if we, using this research, could create a solution to solve these researched negative effects? Anyway, we'll get into that later - let's get to our findings from our outside research.
As mentioned from the very beginning of the project, manosphere content is basically content with primarily misogynistic views and negative opinions about women and sex. So it's sort of implied that it must have some sort of negative effect on adolescents - particularly boys. So, we looked into numerous surveys which have been done - and they were done quite recently too. For example, Proffessors Duffy and Campbell from King's College in London produced the landmark Emerging Ternsions research study - which provided some significant findings. These findings demonstrate how Gen-Z men are moving more 'to the right', which means that they are becoming more conservative. It's shocking that 16% of men surveyed (aged 16-29) believed that feminism had done "more harm than good". 30% of young men who were aware of Andrew Tate believed that he "raises important points", and a third of men aware of Jordan Peterson hold favourable views of him. This survey has a lot more helpful findings, which you can read more about in the provided link (read back to find it!) - since it had helped us a lot.
There was also a recent survey done by Dr. E. Hanson of 1000 UK boys and their parents, supported by Vodafone, which revealed that 69% of 11-14 year-old UK boys have been exposed to misogynistic content online. There is also the worrying statistic of 59% of these boys accessing this kind of content through innocent and unrelated searches - which unintentionally fuels online algorithms, meaning this content appears for a whole lot more people than needed. We also see that 66% of boys stated that seeing this kind of harmful content online made them feel worried, sad, or scared - which can cause negative mental health impacts. On the side of the parents, 1 in 5 parents have noticed a gradulal change over time in the language their son uses to talk about women and girls. These are worrying statistics - and while the aforementioned statistics tell us that boys aren't quite negatively impacted by this content, it's a start - because of their young age, they might not have been aware of how bad this content is, and hence think it is okay to think this way. So, we decided to conduct a survey of our own, and dive deeper into mental health effects - maybe there is one question that hasn't been asked yet? Maybe we haven't considered something yet?
The best bit: OUR OWN findings through surveywork :D
We sent our survey to 727 secondary schools across Ireland, and we managed to gather a lot of people to answer it - 288 people in total, with 208 of them being boys, so it was more than enough for us! The survey consisted of 87 questions, which were made to investigate the following:
- Factors such as the student's age and gender
- The percentage of students (who did the survey) that are exposed to manosphere content and which content they see
- Key manosphere influencers and if participants are aware of them
- Role of algorithms; if a respondent viewed manosphere content once, did it keep appearing in their feed?
- Impact of manosphere content on their mental health
Below are our most significant findings:
As you can see, a total of 68% of respondents thought that this kind of content should at least be partially filtered - this helps us see that it's both not filtered enough at the moment, and that most people would rather not get such content on their feed.
Here we can see that about 92% (at least) occasionally come across manosphere content - with 66% of that seeing it more than the rest. This is a worrying statistic, since this means that the algorithm constantly recommends content like this, and should definitely be filtered more.
You can see here that 63% of all respondents feel that the might feel even the slightest bit of pressure to conform to the norms of manosphere content. This means that perhaps this content is made in such a way where viewers think about it for a while, and think about whether it's okay. Since manosphere creators tend to make it look like what they're saying/doing is okay, people might tend to feel pressure to conform to these influencers' way of life.
We can see here that a shocking 52% of boys feel the need to change themselves or the way they live after seeing manosphere content. This is because most manosphere content - especially gym content - creates an 'ideal image' of men for them; men have to be muscular, tall, big, etc. So, boys might feel that they need to work harder to achieve such a body. This of course can affect other factors of their life as well, like behaviour, eating habits, etc.
Here, we can see that a shocking 38% of respondents found that they feel more negatively about food - which means that they feel they aren't eating the right foods, might consider going on diets to be in better shape, etc. While 38% doesn't seem like a big number, it's definitely a significant statistic, and definitely contributes to poorer mental health.
We can see here that around 65% of respondents found this content to be at least somewhat popular among their age group (the surveyed age group was 11-19). So, this proves that this kind of content is especially popular among adolescents.
Say Goodbye to the Sigmas - our extension comes to life!
Now, building the extension was a whole other story - while there was similar research being made, there was a whole process in learning just how web extensions are built, and how basic content filtering works. Before this project, we had no idea as to how extensions like these even worked behind the scenes; beyond the basics, basically. So, I (Beatrice) have been working a whole lot every evening just learning how content filtering works, how one can advance it, and so forth. After all that, I got to building the extension. There were a lot of prototypes of the extension made - a lot of which weren't great, or were highly inefficient. But, through trial and error, I completed our very first version of the extension - which should be available to download on the Chrome Webstore and the Firefox Addon store, or you can test it by downloading the source files on our GitHub page (found on the footer of the website).
I have explained briefly how it works, but let's go more in-depth into the script itself. When the extension is turned on, there is a script running in the background of every website you visit. There are certain websites defined in the script in which the extension won't work - such as Wikipedia, or government websites - to prevent blocking any potentially educational content, or even unrelated content (e.g. reading about the Greek alphabet, with "sigma" being one of the letters, but also a word which relates to the manosphere). But if you are visiting any other generic website, then this script parses the text you are currently reading, and it checks to see if any key words or phrases relating to the manosphere are mentioned in the text. These key words and phrases are stored in a small dababase-like structure, and there are just under 100 of them. The reason for there being so few is because of the fact that we might potentially block legitimate content, so we tried to make the key words and phrases the least vague or broad as possible.
And that's all - after 1 month of constant blood, sweat, and tears - the extension is ready for use, and has been tested so much to the point I think even the extension itself is exhausted. It is able to block any potentially harmful manosphere content, however, since all extensions are prone to error, some legitimate content may still be blocked. These include news stories, or research articles. However, to develop the extension in the future, I have a lot of plans to avoid mishaps like this - and even get it working with videos or images!
I would like to implement something called dynamic filtering, which is where a script fetches blocklists from an external service, which might already have a massive database built up over years of research, and our extension would 'borrow' some words from there and use these to scan the content. These blocklists also contain rules for identifying what content is good or bad, and how bad content is supposed to be filtered. Due to lack of interest in this field, I would like to create a big database/blocklist like this myself, given more resources, and make it open-source for others to use - since this is crucial research information in this sector. This will help make the margin for error in this extension much smaller - since the database will be massive.
I would also like to implement some automations when creating the database - this means that words or phrases might be added to the database automatically based on context, patterns, and similar factors to help idenfify harmful manosphere content from legitimate content. This makes my own life easier - since making a database with potentially millions of words is quite time-consuming.
Another cool idea I thought of for the future is if we could implement machine learning and AI into the extension itself - once I am given sufficient resources, and knowledge of such a subject, since machine learning is no joke! I could develop a model, which will be trained to identify what content may be harmful, and what content isn't harmful. This helps make the margin for error extremely small - like close to 0, basically. This might help get this extension or overall concept implemented into big social media platforms - like Instagram or TikTok - like they already do with explicit content (like porn). Maybe this model could also help scan images and videos as well, as this form of content is more common nowadays than text-based content.
The birth of this website!
So - the extension is done, and the research is done. Why should we burden ourselves with the development of this website? Well, that's a good question, and here's your answer: our website helps raise awareness about the issues that manosphere content can actually cause, and this is very important nowadays, especically with misogynistic views now being normalised among this generation's adolescent boys. So what we're aiming to do with this website is not only to tell you about our fantastic project, it's to tell you about how manosphere content takes over social media platforms everywhere, and how badly it can affect many people around the world.
If you've reached this point, then you will have probably seen our website and the resources we provide. These are here for the sole purpose of raising awareness, educating you, and providing help if you need it. Unfortunately, there is very little awareness about how bad the manosphere is, and hopefully, with the information and resources we have provided, we have made a difference, and helped to raise greater awareness in Ireland, if not the world.
Our motivation - and a whole lot of acknowledgements!
So, why did we even care about this topic at all? Why are we doing this? Well, unsurprisingly as secondary school students, we are surrounded by boys who find this kind of content funny, entertaining, or worst of all - completely true. It's a pretty bad situation in our area, especially with the all-boys school near us, we see daily how badly boys are affected by this. So, here we are - hoping to put an end to this nonsense!
Before you finally finish reading, we would just like to take a moment to show gratitude. Thank you, whoever you may be, for taking the time to read our website and support us with our project! We're eternally grateful for it, and thanks to you, we can take this project a step further. Even the smallest steps count - so thank you, thank you, and thank you yet again!
Remember; stay safe out there, and don't panic!