2026.Mar.11

REPORTS

Report on the 6th BAIRAL Research Meeting for Fiscal Year 2025
“Negotiating Masculinity in the Age of Algorithms”

On Monday, March 9th, 2026, 5:00–6:30 pm (Japan Time) / 9:00–10:30 am (Sweden Time), B’AI Global Forum hosted the 6th BAIRAL research meeting for FY2025 “Negotiating Masculinity in the Age of Algorithms.” The event, conducted online, featured Ms. Amanda Persson, Doctoral Student in Information Studies at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University (Sweden), as guest speaker.

Ms. Persson presented insights from her doctoral research, in which she questions how young cis-men interact with content from the so-called manosphere on social media platforms, and how their perceptions of masculinity are shaped and negotiated through these interactions. The manosphere has been defined by UN-Women as “an umbrella term for online communities that have increasingly promoted narrow and aggressive definitions of what it means to be a man – and the false narrative that feminism and gender equality have come at the cost of men’s rights.” 

Ms. Persson shared analyses on interviews she conducted with approximately twenty-five boys and young men in Sweden, as well as observations of their interactions with social networking platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat. Drawing from her past work as a school librarian, she highlighted how everyday educational spaces can provide opportunities to engage boys in critical discussions about the online content they encounter, including the ideas promoted by prominent manosphere figures.

The presentation began by situating the manosphere within a broader historical context. The speaker noted that contemporary online communities promoting “red pill” ideologies and misogynistic narratives are often rooted in earlier men’s rights movements that emerged in the 1970s. These movements frame gender equality as a threat and frequently portray men as victims of a feminized society. Within these spaces, a hegemonic masculinity model is promoted through ideals emphasizing strength, economic success, dominance over women, and constant self-improvement. Participants in the study reported encountering such ideals regularly in their social media feeds, often presented through biologically essentialist narratives in which men and women are portrayed as naturally complementary but hierarchically ordered.

A central focus of the lecture was the role of algorithmic recommendation systems in shaping the visibility and circulation of these ideas. The speaker explained that social media platforms operate through recommendation algorithms that continuously analyze user data in order to maximize engagement, which is then sold to advertisers. In this process, users are converted into standardized data points and categorized into measurable types based on patterns of interaction. As a result, different types of manosphere content, often related to themes such as physical strength, economic success, or male dominance, are algorithmically linked and repeatedly recommended to users who fit certain inferred profiles.

The speaker described the relationship between users and algorithms as a kind of “algorithmic dance,” in which both human and non-human actors participate in shaping the flow of content. Factors such as the speed at which users scroll, the tempo of their interactions, and their patterns of engagement influence what appears in their feeds. At the same time, these algorithmic systems are embedded within broader technological infrastructures and commercial logics that strongly structure the possibilities of interaction. From this perspective, the formation of masculine subjectivities online can be understood as a posthuman process in which users and algorithmic systems are mutually entangled.

The research also highlighted the varied strategies young men use to negotiate their exposure to masculinist content. Many participants demonstrated a high level of algorithmic literacy and were aware that recommendation systems shape what they see online. Some attempted to reconfigure their feeds by intentionally scrolling quickly past certain videos, avoiding engagement with misogynistic content, or actively interacting with alternative types of content. However, these strategies often required significant effort and were not always successful. Several participants reported frustration at their inability to fully remove unwanted manosphere content from their feeds, while others eventually chose to reduce their use of social media platforms altogether.

During the discussion, participants explored the broader social implications of these findings. Questions addressed the role of educational spaces such as libraries in fostering critical conversations about social media, as well as the paradox that Sweden, often regarded as one of the most gender-equal societies, has a relatively large online incel (involuntary celibate) presence. The speaker emphasized that many young men feel isolated with the content they encounter online and rarely discuss it openly, sometimes feeling ashamed of the material appearing in their feeds. The conversation also touched on differences between platforms, with several interviewees describing TikTok’s algorithm as particularly fast and accurate in adapting recommendations. Overall, the discussion underscored both the growing awareness among young users of algorithmic influence and the unequal power relationship between individuals and the opaque recommendation systems that shape their online environments.