Research/Study
TikTok’s manosphere problem: Violent misogyny keeps going viral
Despite bans of influencers like Andrew Tate, content promoting violence against women is proliferating across TikTok
Published
Misogynistic “manosphere” influencers including Andrew Tate, Sneako, and Jon Zherka are promoting violence against women and finding virality on TikTok via fan accounts posting their content. Some of these figures, including Sneako and Zherka, have over 100 fan accounts dedicated to sharing their toxic content, making it difficult for the platform to moderate and track the hateful rhetoric that these figures push.
While manosphere influencers themselves are not posting their content to TikTok, their large fan bases are flooding the platform with these influencers’ misogynistic and toxic content. This method — using swaths of devotees to overrun a platform with a particular figure’s content — is not new and has been used by fans of white nationalist and conspiracy theorist figures on TikTok to promote fringe and extremist content. TikTok has not successfully counteracted the massive fan account uploads that violate its Community Guidelines.
These influencers are part of the manosphere, an online community of right-wing websites, bloggers, and personalities cultivating a worldview based on conservative and regressive gender politics repackaged for the internet age.
Figures in this group often push extremism and antisemitism while blaming women for myriad societal woes and treating them as an inferior sex. Rhetoric from these influencers can sometimes be overtly cruel and promote hitting, degrading, and shaming women.
Manosphere personalities use other topics that interest young men — like weightlifting, video games, and boxing — to draw in viewers before diving into extremist content and misogyny, creating a dangerous pipeline for their fans.
TikTok is a uniquely dangerous place for these influencers to infiltrate, as the platform is extremely popular with kids and teens — one survey found that phone users aged 11-17 spend a median time of one hour and 52 minutes per day on the app. Additionally, TikTok’s For You Page algorithm feeds toxic content to users even if they are not seeking it out, which could lead to accidental radicalization; an issue that already plagues men who fall prey to the extreme online communities.
Misogynistic content has previously been singled out as an “enforcement gap” on TikTok, meaning the platform has struggled to moderate content that has promoted sexism. According to TikTok’s Community Guidelines, it does “not allow sexual exploitation or gender-based violence, including non-consensual sexual acts, image-based sexual abuse, sextortion, physical abuse, and sexual harassment."