Often, while speaking with friends and relatives, I encounter the (sorry) naïve views that the ‘manosphere’ is just some sad boys posting ‘locker-room banter’.
Elena Sánchez Nicolás
European regulators, men, and women have a moral imperative to clean up industrialised misogyny and pornography, which enables “human exploitation on a global scale”.
You need look no further than the past few weeks’ headlines to see there is something rotten going on.
On 2 June, Czech police broke up a human-trafficking gang that used the OnlyFans porn platform.
In March, US broadcaster CNN uncovered a rape academy for men on the encrypted Telegram app, which had thousands of users, who taught each other how to drug and abuse women.
Reports of similar groups had earlier come to light, not to mention the cause célèbre of French serial-rape victim Gisèle Pelicot in 2024.
Telegram also came under scrutiny in South Korea in 2024 for chatrooms in which thousands of men shared deepfake porn.
The deepfakers later migrated to Signal, SimpleX Chat, and Viber, reports indicated.
Online platforms have industrialised sexual exploitation of women, while AI has made it easier than ever in history to create, distribute, and monetise sexual content at scale, whether it is consensual – or not.
Estimates suggest 90–95 percent of deepfakes, the vast majority of which depict women, are non-consensual.
Listen to the voice of one of them: Debra Nashipae, a 23-year-old Kenyan student and aspiring musician, whom the BBC interviewed last year.
Despite US Big Tech’s claims of goodwill, nudifying and stripping apps in Apple’s App Store and Google Play were downloaded 483m times and generated $122m (€106m) in revenue, according to market-research firm AppMagic.
And in January, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate in the US also found that xAI’s Grok had generated 3m sexual images, including 23,000 sexual pictures of children, in 11 days.
Silicon-valley algorithms mesmerise young people (and adult men) to infinitely scroll for ever-more extreme content.
Taken together, it’s a disturbing Western wave, which is being politically weaponised, and it poses huge problems for EU regulators – not to mention its victims.
Landmark cases, such as the first federal convictions under the US ‘TAKE IT DOWN’ Act and the UK’s criminalisation of sexual deepfakes were steps in the right direction, updating justice systems for the AI era.
Much more must be done.
Tate’s ‘manosphere‘
Alongside the AI-sex slop and OnlyFans gangs, something worries me even more: online mainstreaming of extreme misogyny.
It’s being engineered by personalities like the “despicable” influencer Andrew Tate and the ‘manosphere’ he helped to build, as well as his imitators, such as Amadeo Llados in Spain, or Illan Castronovo in France.
They have important numbers of followers – Tate’s videos on TikTok saw 12bn views before he was banned from the platform in 2022.
Many viewers were juvenile men searching for role models; what they found was femicidal brainwashing.
But predators such as Tate aside, women also played a role.
Some women, such as British porn-star ‘Bonnie Blue’, have become global celebrities and created business empires worth hundreds of millions of euros.
Others, such as US ‘tradwife’ influencers made money proselytising 1950’s-era sexism, racism, and homophobia.
Banning offensive accounts often boomerangs.
It makes Tate-types into martyrs – his clips were endlessly reposted by fans on all platforms after he was personally kicked off TikTok, X, and YouTube.
At the same time, failure to regulate Big Tech means “the manosphere will continue to … amplify its messages,” said this research paper.
And manosphere stars worked “in the service of larger reactionary projects invested in rolling back human rights and facilitating human exploitation at global scale,” the study said.
Democratic rot
Often, while speaking with friends and relatives, I encounter (sorry) naïve views that it’s just a fringe subculture – some sad boys posting ‘locker-room banter’.
But it’s a global industry worth billions of euros, with a political agenda, and its commodities are women and children.
Even Netflix has woken up, with a documentary by Louis Theroux and its Adolescence drama.
So what?
Online misogyny and porn are gateway drugs, not just for violence in the real world, but also extremist ideologies and democratic decay.
We’re seeing it in the US, where Christian-nationalist pastors and MAGA-aligned influencers are pushing to roll back women’s voting rights, under the slogan “Repeal the 19th” (amendment of the US constitution).
This isn’t funny any more – the US is now a collapsing democracy
The ‘Save Act’ bill on Capitol Hill, which tightens proof-of-citizenship burdens for voters, also threatens to disenfranchise millions of American women.
“When your neighbour’s house is on fire, beware your own,” as the saying goes.
US culture is in flames and we need to beware our shared, transatlantic home – defending women’s rights (and children) is a moral and democratic imperative we can’t ignore.
