The Algorithm Is the New Role Model for Boys

As a proud member of Generation X, I’m deeply concerned about the future of the male species. It’s not easy being a man — there are advantages, but they come with a cost. As boys, we were told to “man up,” but nobody actually taught us how to handle stress, failure, or success. We learned to keep our feelings close to the chest, because struggle was interpreted as weakness. We figured it out alone.But we had role models doing the figuring out for us first. Fathers, grandfathers, athletes who were sportsmen rather than brands, musicians who made music, tough-as-nails men on screen. Whatever you think of that model, it was at least a model — guidance from every angle about what was expected of a man.Today’s adolescent boy has traded all of that for an algorithm. Fathers chose to be “friends” with their kids instead of parents. The average 12-year-old boy spends roughly seven hours a day online — not an outlier, but the norm, in a world where both parents have to work just to keep up. Friendships that used to be forged on a field or a stoop now happen through a screen, including a boy’s first fumbling interest in girls. Most of the male figures he finds there are extreme, self-centered, or performing a version of masculinity built for engagement, not truth.Nobody appointed the algorithm to raise our sons. It just needed attention, and adolescent boys — adrift, uncertain, hungry for a map — have plenty to give.To understand how we got here, take a look at what disappeared. Church attendance has collapsed, and with it a source of community and shared obligation. Stable industries that once gave working men an identity — manufacturing, mining, construction — have eroded. Divorce has left millions of households without a father present. Men now make up only around 15% of the primary-school teaching workforce in America. Testosterone levels in young men appear to be trending down. Team sports, which once gave boys structure and competition in equal measure, have declined. Put simply: millions of boys are being raised in environments shaped almost entirely by women — loving, capable women, but without a male presence to study, question, or push against. They arrive at adolescence hungry for a masculine identity with no reliable map to find one.Into that vacuum walked the internet, armed with plenty of ideas. Recommendation algorithms are built to maximize attention, not wellbeing, and adolescent boys respond powerfully to content that’s exciting, transgressive, or emotionally validating. A 13-year-old watches a workout video; six weeks later he’s being fed content telling him men are under attack, that sensitivity is weakness, that the world owes him more than it’s delivering. Researchers who study online radicalization describe it not as a sudden conversion but a slow drift — each video only slightly more extreme than the last, each creator only marginally more abrasive, until content that would have alarmed him six months ago simply feels like common sense.The creators who thrive in that ecosystem share a formula: total confidence, direct answers to questions a boy is too embarrassed to ask anyone in his actual life, and the flattering suggestion that he’s finally being told the truth everyone else was too afraid to tell him. Some of what they offer is genuinely useful — fitness, financial basics, discipline. Some of it frames ordinary male frustration as proof of persecution. Most of it lives in the uncomfortable space between the two.Andrew Tate — who was arrested, along with his brother Tristan earlier this week — is the most visible face of this. But he’s a symptom, not the cause. His content had been viewed more than 11 billion times on TikTok alone by the time major platforms banned him in 2022 — and banning him didn’t close the vacuum, it just left an opening for the next one. The demand exists. The supply will always show up for it. It’s not the Andrew Tates that should be most concerning, but the society that creates them.Nicolás Reyes and Javier Cámara in ‘Memories of My Father.’ Cohen Media GroupIt would be easy, and wrong, to write these boys off as broken or bigoted. What they’re actually looking for is something real — identity, purpose, the sense that their struggle is seen — and what they’re finding is a corrupted version of it. That drive for status and belonging isn’t the problem; male adolescence has always been turbulent. The problem is that the people who once guided that drive have weakened, right as the platforms built to exploit it have gotten stronger.A boy who feels invisible at school, distant from his father, and quietly afraid of getting it all wrong doesn’t need to be told he’s a future extremist. He needs to be seen. The tragedy is that the algorithm sees him — or performs seeing him — better than almost anything else in his life does.The platforms bear real responsibility here, and regulation is coming, overdue as it is. But policing the feed isn’t the whole answer. The real question is what we’re offering boys instead — more present fathers, more male teachers, more room to be confused without being dismissed or diagnosed. Until we have that conversation seriously, the algorithm will keep having it for us.The boy on the screen is still watching. The feed is still playing. Somewhere in a recommendation queue, the next video is already loading.Vivek Nagrani is founder of ARTICL3, a scientific approach to men’s clothing and author of The Burden of Masculinity.

The Algorithm Is the New Role Model for Boys

The Algorithm Is the New Role Model for Boys

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