How social media promotes hypermasculine content
Teenagers and their mentors discuss how young Australians interpret the gender roles perpetuated on social media. Video by Lucy Arundell.
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00:00The social media platforms are really good at keeping you in and really locking you in and a bunch of confirmation bias that you're hearing all the time
00:07and people validating you and connecting you with people that think similarly to you.
00:12Sometimes that's not always what's best for us.
00:15Possibly once or twice a week I'll see videos pushing hyper-masculine messages which are a bit out of touch with reality, I think.
00:24Yeah, sometimes I go searching for it because I want to see what I'm up against.
00:30Yeah, so I see a lot of stuff that is backlash against feminism and saying that women are trying too hard
00:40and women are arguing for things that they don't need to argue about.
00:45All this unfiltered influence that they've got online is immense, that there's opinions all day every day being fed and targeted at them.
00:55We risk a regression as social media influencers peddle misogyny for likes and promote gender stereotyping for followers.
01:04Increasingly I think kids understand that what they're seeing on Instagram and TikTok is not necessarily researched informed journalism.
01:13It's an opinion or an idea largely coming from an algorithm and I think our kids understand that.
01:21Just the same, it can be an instrument for distortion and cruelty and toxicity
01:27and increasingly we want to enter into that space with kids in a classroom to help them understand the difference.