Enough derangement on “boys and social media”

Youth Derangement Syndrome and Social Media Derangement Syndrome have merged into ugly boy-bashing

Two months ago, I took a hard look at the flaws of political and social analysts’ blaming every young-age trend they don’t like on “social media.” In herdlike mooings, they reflexively blame young men’s behaviors, from conservatism to knife-killings, on the right-wing “manosphere” (including “incel” [“involuntarily celibate”]) punditry led by the ilks of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.

To liberal blamers in particular, it just couldn’t be real-life conditions driving young-male attitudes; it must be the shallow hatreds boys and young men mindlessly parrot from social media. No evidence; just moralizing, and sometimes outright deception.

The New York Times’ Ezra Klein’s liberal “Why Trump Won” show with Democratic pollster David Shor declared Gen Z “potentially the most conservative generation” in which “Democrats are getting destroyed.” Wrong claim spawned wronger speculation. “The ‘manosphere’” has “had a huge effect on young men’s political opinions,” Klein declared, without a shred of evidence. Agreed Shor: “It should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people’s social worlds to be entirely online all at once caused the political situation to change.”

Neither mentioned major-media exit polls that showed in the 2024 election, men ages 18-29 were more likely to vote AGAINST Trump than any older male age group (49%) – more anti-Trump than Klein’s and Shor’s generation.

Now, in April 2025, the latest Harvard IOP poll shows men age 18-29 disapprove of Trump by a stunning 34-59% margin. What… did Tate, Peterson, and the “toxic manosphere” suddenly go squishy Left? Or, could young men’s attitudes be coming from more personally lived experiences than just aping social media vibes?

Oboy, did it get worse

Then Netflix popped out Adolescence, a TV series viewable either as a muddled, second-rate fictionalization of a UK middle-school knife murder, or – as happened, universally – wildly hurrahed as a massive “wake-up call” on today’s new “terrorism … perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety” (yeah, that was UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s idea of “grownup” maturity).

I still think Adolescence is just a bad joke. Nowhere do its four hours even try to show its 13-year-old knifer was driven to kill a female classmate by “manosphere” misogyny (which he doesn’t like) while it does show the lad’s father’s strikingly identical violent rampaging. No matter. Incited by actor Stephen Graham’s irresponsible rantings, the gullible herd again stampeded: just blame social media!

Youth Derangement Syndrome and Social Media Derangement Syndrome have merged into a unitary scapegoat for every trend (and rare incident grotesquely distorted into a “trend”) whatever observer bellowing through whatever bullhorn doesn’t like. An orgy of crazed hate speech vilifying boys and young men has flooded the post-Adolescence weeks.

Why has young men’s approval of women’s rights fallen?

Unlike boys’ knife murders (which are plummeting in the UK and US alike, a trend Adolescence and its howling mob grossly lie about), there are real trends that do appear negative, though we have no clue what they signify.

Among 8^th grade boys surveyed by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future and tabulated by David Waldron, support for women’s job opportunities and equal pay fell sharply from 2018 to 2023. Surely this proves the evils of social media, especially the “manosphere”?

Waldron’s research provides another look-before-you-stampede moment. While “many commentators on the topic of misogyny among boys are quick to blame social media and internet subcultures such as the ‘manosphere’ or ‘incels’” and “evidence that social media algorithms tend to amplify misogynistic content,” he concludes, “this particular hypothesis is not confirmed by data from this survey.”

Just the opposite

The MTF “data shows that the sharper drops in the share of boys endorsing gender equality occurred in those who spend the least time using social networks,” Waldron finds. Further, boys who spend less time watching videos and less time playing video games show the LEAST decline in and a HIGHER level of support for women’s rights.

Instead, there are indicators – weird ones. First, it isn’t the “loners in their bedrooms” who show the biggest drop in support for women’s job rights, but boys who spend more time hanging out with other people. Ponder that.

Second, while the presence of a father in the home has little effect, boys with college-educated mothers (much more supportive of women’s rights prior to 2018) show a much bigger drop in support for women’s equality since than boys with less educated mothers. That also ain’t supposed to be. Educated moms are supposed to raise liberal boys, especially since more education is increasingly correlated with more liberal politics. Gen Z isn’t acting according to traditional doctrines.

Finally, and most important: “That the popularity of gender equality plummeted so much among religious boys seems to be the main clue available in the survey about what factors might be driving this trend,” Waldron points out.

In 1990, boys who reported religion is important and those saying religion is unimportant showed about the same “completely agree” support for women’s job equality (52%). But from 1990 to 2018 – a period during which daily social media use among boys rose from zero to over 90% – religious boys showed a much smaller increase in support for women’s equality (to 60%) than non-religious boys (66%).

Then, from 2018 to 2023, such full support for women’s job equality plummeted among religious boys (to 38%), but not nearly as much among non-religious boys (to 52%). Why? The COVID-19 pandemic apparently had some effect on all these trends, but why the intriguing mix of other anomalies?

The anti-social-media dogmatists should be sobered by the fact that their pet remedies — just get boys away from those screens and out into public with people, maybe going to church more — would cure boys’ imagined malaise are demolished by real-world findings. If analysts can pull their heads out of social-media swamp dogma, they might be able to see true social factors. The gender pay gap has dwindled among under-20 male and female workers to much narrower margins than for older workers, allowing older-male commentators to smugly deride young men’s anxieties while enjoying their age- and gender-privileged comforts.

Table 1. Wages by gender and age, 2024

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Forbes Magazine.

The dramatic narrowing of the gender wage gap at teen ages is great news (though the persistently low wage isn’t), just as the persistence of a large gender gap at older ages remains terrible news. A beneficial result is that younger women’s economic dependence on men is disappearing, allowing delayed and more reasoned choices in education, career, and family formation. As young women move upward economically and to the left politically, young men are in limbo.

This trend may terrify older conservatives and liberals alike and produce anxiety among a fraction of young men (note that the decline in support for women’s job equality since 2018 results from changes in belief by fewer than 10% of young men, with religion and social factors much more salient). But whatever is going on, like Mr. Jones, we don’t know what it is. All we hear is more noise from the always-blame-social-media cabal.