How do we counter the influence of the far-right manosphere in Scotland?
Opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and not of Scotland’s Futures Forum, members of its staff, or the Scottish Parliament.
Last year, my colleague (Dr Callum McGregor) and I conducted a series of focus groups with teachers in three regions of Scotland as part of a research project on political literacy. Because the study involved a self-selecting sample of 30 teachers, we are not claiming the data is representative of all Scottish teachers. However, across all our focus groups, teachers reported an unsettling political climate within their schools, the influence of the manosphere and the far-right, and a lack of shared understanding of what everyone was engaging with online.
Unsettling political climate
Several participants described students expressing identification with political movements or figures in the USA. For example, a teacher recalled pupils celebrating Donald Trump’s electoral success by saying “we won”, suggesting a sense of affiliation with the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. One head teacher in the Highlands found Nazi swastikas painted around her school. Female teachers spoke about experiencing much lower levels of respect and obedience compared to male colleagues. This sexism, they said, was often accompanied by misogynistic language and behaviour from some male students.
The influence of the manosphere and far-right
The teachers connected this language to online cultures, influencers such as the prominent misogynist Andrew Tate, who has 11 million followers on X, and political discourse encountered outside school. To support this link, YouGov found nationally that just over 1 in 10 boys aged 13-15 agreed with Tate’s explicitly misogynistic views. Tate is far from an isolated figure. He has many imitators and he is part of a whole ecosystem called the ‘manosphere’ that overlaps with the MAGA far-right, which may help explain what teachers were reporting in terms of the coincidence of Nazi symbols and misogyny. The manosphere includes far-right figures such as online streamer Adin Ross (2.6m followers on X), Nick Fuentes (1.2m followers on X) and X’s owner Elon Musk (234.8m followers on X).
However, it’s wrong to think of this as young men uniquely being directly radicalised by online influencers. Teachers often emphasised that these attitudes were not confined to students, recounting encounters with parents, grandparents, other relatives, and even colleagues whose views they regarded as increasingly extreme. One teacher told us about a colleague who admired Tate for his entrepreneurship. Another told us about a young student being taken on a far-right anti-immigrant march by their parents.
A lack of shared understanding
Given the opportunity to engage with them in private conversation, teachers reported that working class boys, perhaps more so than more politically committed middle class boys, could be reasoned with. Those professionals who encountered such views spoke of the emotional labour and expertise involved in challenging them in ways that were constructive and non-confrontational. However, such interventions were undermined by a lack of shared understanding.
Teachers mainly spoke of mutually reinforcing chaos and ignorance; of everyone having personalised social media and little sense of shared reality; of increasingly convincing deep-fakes and esoteric memes codified with political messages and of having no idea about what young people were being exposed to. This is true of all us as we live in a world where we don’t know what everyone else is seeing in their feeds. We therefore often have no idea what is dominating other people’s ideas and what technologies they are using until we see something that has been scaling up under the radar burst into our lives.
For example, beyond researchers into online misogyny, few people would be aware that there are 55 apps on Google Play Store that will remove clothes from women and girls. Similarly, unless you were a researcher concerned about their impact, you would not be aware that there are 337 AI companion apps on Apple Store and Google Play (128 were created last year alone). Companion apps are dangerous and poorly regulated. How many people have heard of ‘Amelia’, the AI-generated British schoolgirl who is a far-right social media star? Who is aware of the TikTok trend of looksmaxxing, which exploits vulnerable young men by combining self-harming ‘fixes’ for their lack of model-like looks with far-right ideas about women?
All the tools and conditions are there to produce more dysfunctional effects than we are seeing already. A far-right companion app that radicalises its users, and an app that enables them to put women they know into violent AI-generated porn is possible now. Yet, we will only react when such developments break through to mainstream news outlets. Research specific to Scotland is very thin on the ground. We need a much better evidence-informed understanding of what different communities and individuals are seeing online, otherwise we will always be reactive and too late for any intervention. This evidence could inform the most effective strategy to address a future that is likely to be characterized by a further deterioration in our shared reality and more subsequent instances of radicalisation; namely pre-bunking.
Pre-bunking alerts audiences to the tricks of the trade; the methods of targeting, attention-hacking and story-telling that bad faith actors and technology companies use. For example, zero-sum thinking – that the belief that you are not getting what you deserve because someone is gaining at your expense – is a key vulnerability that figures such as Tate and ‘companion’ apps can exploit. Treating radicalisation more like a scam that people can interrupt themselves is much less resource intensive than trying to de-radicalise someone who is already toxifying their relationships with teachers and peers and retreating deeper into the community that validates them.
We all have biases, psychological blind spots, and short-cuts to our emotions that override our rational thought processes. We tend not to check facts that threaten our sense of self and our affinities. We often hold on to what is emotionally true even when it is factually false. Pre-bunking that includes the knowledge and skills to know when, how and why we are being targeted should be integral to young people’s education and future curriculum design.
Dr Huw C. Davies
Dr Huw C. Davies is a Lecturer in Educational Futures and Digital Education based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. His research encompasses different forms of literacy, including media, digital, AI, and political literacy, and how they can be taught in combination. He can be contacted huw.davies@ed.ac.uk and on LinkedIn.
