It began with a tweet. A throwaway line about ‘male loneliness’ that my brother, a liberal Hollywood actor known for his roles in indie dramas, typed out at 2 a.m. He had 20,000 followers at the time, mostly fans of his work. Within hours, the tweet had been shared by accounts with names like ‘The Red Pill Philosopher’ and ‘Manovate’. Within days, he was fielding calls from podcast hosts who asked him to elaborate on ‘the crisis of masculinity’. Within weeks, he had abandoned his acting career and become the face of a movement he never intended to join.
My brother’s journey from committed progressive to manosphere messiah is not unique in Silicon Valley, where I work as a technology and innovation lead. I have seen the algorithms that turn niche grievances into global movements. I have watched as the feedback loops of recommendation engines amplify the very content that polarises us. But seeing it happen to my own brother, to the man who taught me to recycle and who marched for Black Lives Matter, has given me a front-row seat to the most sophisticated behaviour modification system ever built: the social media engagement engine.
The turning point, as my brother tells it, came during the pandemic. He was stuck at home, unable to work, scrolling through his phone for hours. The algorithm noticed his engagement with posts about men’s mental health. It started feeding him content from accounts that framed feminism as a zero-sum game. Then came the clips of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, curated into his feed with surgical precision. My brother, who once launched a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, found himself nodding along to a video claiming that ‘the left has abandoned men’. He didn’t become a misogynist overnight. Rather, he was algorithmically nudged toward a worldview that made him feel seen, validated, and part of a tribe.
What my brother experienced is a feature of the platform economy, not a bug. The internet’s attention merchants have perfected the art of capturing our gaze by feeding us content that triggers outrage, fear, or belonging. For a demographic of disaffected men, the pitch is simple: you are not the problem, society is. This message is delivered through a relentless stream of videos, memes, and manifestos, each one slightly more extreme than the last. The system does not care about truth or well-being, it cares about engagement. And nothing engages like a narrative of victimhood and revenge.
I have spent my career building the very technologies I now critique. I understand the appeal of optimisation, of making data work for us. But watching my brother drift into a manosphere echo chamber has forced me to confront the ethical vacuum at the heart of my industry. We have created systems that know more about our desires than we do, yet we have given them no moral compass. They are tools for persuasion without conscience, amplifying the loudest and most divisive voices because that is what holds attention.
My brother’s new audience tells him he is a ‘truth-teller’. They send him gifts and money and adulation. He has replaced the hollow validation of Hollywood with the heady rush of being a movement’s figurehead. He believes he is helping men find purpose. I believe he is being used by a machine that has no loyalty to anyone but its own metrics.
The tragedy is that my brother is not a hateful person. He is a lonely, confused man who found a digital sanctuary that replaced the real-world connections he lost. The manosphere gave him a language for his pain, but it also closed him off from nuance, from complexity, and from his own family. I have tried to reason with him, but how do you argue with a worldview that has been algorithmically optimised to feel irrefutable?
This story is not just about my brother. It is about millions of men being funnelled into radicalisation pipelines by platforms that prioritise profit over people. It is about a tech industry that has perfected the art of manipulation while dodging accountability. And it is about a society that has outsourced its moral reasoning to machines that do not reason at all.
I do not know if my brother will ever find his way back. But I do know that the system that transformed him from a liberal actor into a manosphere messiah will continue its work unless we demand a different architecture for our digital lives. One that values human flourishing over engagement. One that remembers that every user is a person, not a data point. One that might, just might, let my brother come home.
