Men and boys need as much protection as women and girls from harmful influencers and “the worst parts of the internet”, a group of MPs have told Ofcom as they called for the regulator to give specific guidance to online platforms.
More than 60 Labour MPs have written to the Ofcom chief executive, Melanie Dawes, urging her to protect men and boys from “manosphere” influencers who may expose them to gambling, sextortion and violent pornography.
The Online Safety Act forced Ofcom to give tech platforms guidance on how to tackle “harmful content and activity that disproportionately affects women and girls”, but MPs argued that men and boys are also targeted in specific ways.
According to the Gambling Commission, 53% of 11- to 17-year-old boys see gambling adverts online each week, compared with 31% of their female peers, while 91% of sextortion victims are male, according to the Internet Watch Foundation.
Alistair Strathern, the MP for Hitchin and a co-chair of the Labour group for men and boys, said the Louis Theroux documentary Inside the Manosphere was “another reminder of a particular way some of the worst of the internet can prey on young men and boys”.
The documentary revealed how some manosphere influencers were exploiting young men “by peddling lies, falsehoods and hate”, said Nick Isles, the director of the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys, which has contacted Ofcom to call for tech companies to be given guidance on the specific risks facing men and boys online.
“These [influencers] may be lost souls but the people they affect are not,” he said. “It is these young boys and men that we need to do more to protect by using our existing laws to prosecute hate speech, by creating new legislation where needed and through the tax system to confiscate moneys earned through activity which harms.”
Strathern said MPs were not looking for “equity for the sake of it” but he said violence against women and girls could not be tackled if the specific harms faced by men and boys were not also addressed as they were “another aspect of the same problems”.
“These harms are not just done to men and boys,” he said. “This is a harm that impacts the women and girls in their life too. We are all losing out as a result of the failure to protect men and boys from some of the risks they face in the online world.”
The letter to Dawes says men and boys are at “disproportionate risk of specific harms including far-right political radicalisation, crypto scams and violent pornography through content by popular creators”.
While they are exposed to harmful content including misinformation and disinformation, pornography and misogynist content at a similar rate to women and girls, the “content targeted at a male audience is likely to be different, and platforms might need to take different steps to understand and tackle the problem,” it states.
Strathern said Ofcom needed to “step up” and do more to tackle gendered online harms. “I think that the challenge to them is to show they’re taking this seriously,” he said. “When there is clear evidence around the gendered aspects of harms affecting boys and men, as well as women and girls, and their job is to keep all of us safe on the internet, we think there’s a gap that they need to step up and act on.”
An Ofcom spokesperson said protections in place under the Online Safety Act were designed to benefit anyone experiencing online abuse.
“We also know that exposure to harmful online content can negatively affect boys, which is why our codes require services to protect them from being exposed to pornographic, hateful and abusive content,” they said. “Our guidance encourages tech companies to use educational and preventive approaches that help reduce online abuse.”
