LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyFor many years now, a dark question has haunted parents, teachers, the internet, and media institutions: What’s wrong with young men?
Why, people ask, are boys so politically extreme, spouting misogynist rhetoric, and increasingly drawn into risky crypto schemes and online gambling? How did they become so lonely, with their depression symptoms often overlooked? The male youth vote broke for Trump in the 2024 election following a GOP campaign built on naked appeals to meathead machismo. Yet there are signs that his second term in office has done little to stem the anger of Gen Z men, whose support for the president is now plummeting.
The most common explanation of these interrelated phenomena is that younger men have banded together online under the umbrella of something known as the “manosphere,” usually conceived as an organic right-wing rebellion driving the culture wars. A new study, however, suggests that this is entirely backward: The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than it is a pyramid scheme.
In “The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online,” researchers from the digital safety organization Reset Tech and the nonprofit Equimundo map how men are “algorithmically routed into paid communities, unregulated supplements, crypto schemes, and high-ticket ‘coaching’ programs,” which together make up a “multibillion-dollar industry.”
“‘Masculinity’ has become a commercial category that is constructed, curated, and financially incentivized online,” write the authors of the 153-page report.
First, men encounter aspirational self-help content when looking up advice on dating, fitness, or finance. Bad actors then exploit their areas of vulnerability by offering a misleading, grievance-based narrative to explain their frustrations. The paper cites, for example, a verified “business” account on X that used real economic data to falsely claim that the high rate of youth unemployment is only affecting men.
“By framing credential competition and labor market dynamics as a coordinated attack on men,” the researchers write, “this operation converts genuine economic anxiety—which is real and documented—into resentment with named targets: women, immigrants, foreign workers.”
Once men feel they are in community with one another based on a shared sense of victimhood and betrayal, and hostility toward a mutual enemy, the same predatory characters can then sell them the dubious solution, whether that’s a class, access to an exclusive club, or gray-market pills. In breaking down the sources of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate’s income, the researchers estimate that he makes $184 million in annual gross revenue just from his subscription-based “Real World” education platform, which costs $99 per month. Reset Tech and Equimundo call these kinds of membership and course systems “fraud at scale,” noting their manipulative character: “Recycled content, affiliate pyramids, deliberate cancellation barriers, and deceptive testimonials characterize the industry’s flagship products.” (Tate’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, are fighting extradition to the UK on charges of rape and sex trafficking after being arrested in Florida last month; their attorney has said they are innocent.)
Meanwhile, the report pegs the range of hourly streaming revenue for top-tier streamers such as Adin Ross (who also has an equity stake in Kick, the site that hosts his live content) at around $30,000 to $50,000. Figures like Joe Rogan command speaking fees upwards of $200,000. And top creators in the space, the study estimates, can earn anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in annual revenue across income streams including “platform payouts, sponsorships, courses, memberships, and speaking fees.” (Neither Rogan’s manager nor Ross’ entertainment company immediately returned a request for comment.)
Gary Barker, founder and CEO of Equimundo, which advocates for gender equality and positive masculinity, says we can better understand the so-called manosphere by looking at how those at the top are cultivating and then monetizing resentment and anger among young men. “They're being duped,” he says of these consumers. “They deserve to be getting straight information on products that actually do what they say they do, and not [be] swindled out of their money.”
The platforms, of course, take a cut of the profits and reward masculinity influencers for pushing extreme views while generating controversy and conflict. Reset Tech performed a cross-platform analysis of “looksmaxxing” content, heavily amplified this year by the Kick streamer Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular, to capture the scale of trends that drive men to pay exorbitant sums for the supposed means to improve their status. “Across 216 influencers tracked on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, the combined reach of looksmaxxing-related operations exceeded 14.6 billion views during the analysis period,” they concluded. “The reach is not organic—it is a product of recommendation architecture.”
The report draws a parallel between this harmful material and the kind of pro-eating-disorder content that targets women. It notes that while platforms were eventually pressured to take action against the latter—though not always with success—they have not pursued the same kind of enforcement against users reinforcing men’s negative body image to promote unhealthy behaviors. (Meta, Google, TikTok, X, and Kick did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their guidelines around potentially harmful manosphere content.)
Clavicular’s rise to fame also provides evidence of how outrage fuels clicks that ultimately line the pockets of masculinity gurus. In January 2026, he and other influencers including Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Sneako livestreamed themselves listening to Kanye West’s antisemitic song “Heil Hitler” in a sprinter van in Miami. Clips spread far beyond the original Kick audience via aggregator accounts on mainstream platforms, drawing widespread condemnation.
While the better-known Tates saw little change in their audience following the incident, Clavicular, who was then far less prominent, saw an explosion in engagement. Two weeks later, he was averaging close to 3 million views on his X posts, compared to about 500,000 two weeks before the stream. The larger viewership meant more potential students for his looksmaxxing “academy,” which costs $49 at the lowest tier and up to $3,000 for private coaching.
Barker says that while younger kids can be kept out of this pipeline by their parents, advocacy groups, and legislatively imposed protections, men entering adulthood don’t have the same support. “If we're looking at the 18- to 29-year-olds, which is where we see the biggest traffic to these spaces, nobody's got their back,” he says. This demographic “falls through the cracks” because society expects that they “should be able to handle this by themselves” as skeptical media consumers, he adds.
However, in post-2024 focus groups, Reset Tech found that young men could demonstrate a “striking lack of self-awareness” when it came to their sources of news and perspectives on current events, considering podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience essentially unbiased. They also “believed women were trapped in echo chambers looking at makeup and lifestyle content while they themselves received information from neutral, verified sources,” the researchers write.
“We've got to reach them to basically be more critical with what they look at,” Barker says. “They do want to call out when stuff is bullshit,” he adds, it’s just that the digital ecosystem and its algorithms have, by their very nature, “narrowed” men’s opportunities to experience views that meaningfully challenge their own.
In the absence of action from the platforms, Barker says, it will be up to the users to recognize that the people selling them peptides, dating hacks, and get-rich-quick schemes are taking advantage of them—and leave the associated online communities or even mobilize others to do the same by calling out the harms they cause. Maybe a young male commentator who devotes themselves to exposing the toxic lies and scams of the grievance economy would become an influencer in their own right.
“I think it's not gonna be a tomorrow thing, that we get a group of young men who are like, ‘Yeah, I'm gonna be the warrior for calling out injustice online,’” Barker says. “But I think it's kind of where some of the action has got to come from.”
