Barker says that while younger kids can be kept out of this pipeline by their parents, advocacy groups, and legislatively imposed protections, men entering adulthood don’t have the same support. “If we're looking at the 18- to 29-year-olds, which is where we see the biggest traffic to these spaces, nobody's got their back,” he says. This demographic “falls through the cracks” because society expects that they “should be able to handle this by themselves” as skeptical media consumers, he adds.

However, in post-2024 focus groups, Reset Tech found that young men could demonstrate a “striking lack of self-awareness” when it came to their sources of news and perspectives on current events, considering podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience essentially unbiased. They also “believed women were trapped in echo chambers looking at makeup and lifestyle content while they themselves received information from neutral, verified sources,” the researchers write.

“We've got to reach them to basically be more critical with what they look at,” Barker says. “They do want to call out when stuff is bullshit,” he adds, it’s just that the digital ecosystem and its algorithms have, by their very nature, “narrowed” men’s opportunities to experience views that meaningfully challenge their own.

In the absence of action from the platforms, Barker says, it will be up to the users to recognize that the people selling them peptides, dating hacks, and get-rich-quick schemes are taking advantage of them—and leave the associated online communities or even mobilize others to do the same by calling out the harms they cause. Maybe a young male commentator who devotes themselves to exposing the toxic lies and scams of the grievance economy would become an influencer in their own right.

“I think it's not gonna be a tomorrow thing, that we get a group of young men who are like, ‘Yeah, I'm gonna be the warrior for calling out injustice online,’” Barker says. “But I think it's kind of where some of the action has got to come from.”

We need to teach critical thinking at all levels. We are failing our children which in turn leads to us failing our young adults. And this is by design, at least in the US. The lack of education directly leads to this kind of deception. And all of this feels reminiscent of the conversations we're having around MAGA voters being tricked essentially.

There's a vacuum here where an influencer can step in and start calling this stuff out and I love that the author concluded the article with that call to action.

Have we considered the necessity of properly socializing men from childhood on? From my own personal experience: I don't know how to make friends. I don't know how to find a relationship. I almost went down the incel pipeline at one point, but realized I can't really blame anyone else for my own failures.

I also have no idea how to even start working to change that.

Forgot the archive link in case anyone hits the paywall: https://archive.is/20260810154444/https://www.wired.com/story/the-manosphere-isnt-a-movement-its-a-multibillion-dollar-grievance-industry/

funny how the "manliest" men cry the loudest about being victimized for being manly

For a treat, look up Gamergate. Hint, it predated the Alt-Right movement while pioneering many of those same techniques that lead to Donald Trump's election in the USA (I also note that many of these identical techniques are used by tankies here on the Threadiverse too, like whataboutism and didoing).

There is nothing new under the sun - only pre-existing concepts that cycle up and down in popularity. That said, the rise of an anonymous internet that has platformed these types of "alternative" thinking processes has emboldened trolling behaviors and helped it cross over into the mainstream and even bring it forth from hidden chatrooms into irl - e.g. voting in election polls, based on a concept such as bOtH sIdEs SaMe.

iMO gaming and cars.

Young teens stay inside gaming and they form their friendships with other guys there and then keep them as they age. That compounds with the stupidity of car culture and a lack of PT and cycling infra and zero cost places to "hangout" with friends.

How does a 12yr old boy get across three suburbs to see a friends for real, deal with the friends sister and family etc

Hikikomori in Japan, they stay at home, game and goon so who knows ?

solutions ? i (M 58) don't have any but this will get worse, It's also naive of girls/ women to do nothing and worse still to laugh or pearl clutch about it, sure incels, groypers etc arent their problem but it's like hungry people aren't their problem... until they are starving and come take your food and eat it all and all of a sudden...

what a fuckin' mess. I bought a home in a small rural village in the middle of no where on a hill for a reason ;) the entire way we have structured our societies, political and economic systems is wrong and won't change before it collapses and has to change.