Kristina Wilfore: Male anxieties being weaponised

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1:14Marianna Spring:Hello, I'm BBC presenter Marianna Spring and this is the interview from the BBC World Service, the best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. I want to get freedom. I like that freedom. A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this is fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end. For this interview, me and fellow investigative journalist Matt Shea spoke to Christina Wilford, an expert in state information warfare, who has been looking into what she describes as the male grievance industry and how it's defrauding young men on social media and beyond.

2:02Marianna Spring:She says it's evolved from the manosphere and is much more organised. She describes it as a whole industry with a pipeline which makes money for content creators and social media companies. Christina's report, The Grift Economy, How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online, looks at how influencers are exploiting anxiety felt by men. Feelings around body image and disenfranchisement are being weaponised, all based on tactics similar to ones she's seen play out during state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. She reveals new data about looks-maxing, the extreme cosmetic social media trend, which shows how just 216 accounts drove 14.6 billion views on this type of content within the last two years.

2:48Marianna Spring:She describes how the content promotes a distortion of the real pressures men face. What do we even mean by a grievance? And why is it so much a part of the Tinder, the material that lets this spread? It's a distortion of real pressures. And when I'm analyzing trends around men, I'm listening to what they're saying. And they are wanting to lean into what being a man means in many cases. strength, loyalty, protection, those are not bad values. Those are being exploited, weaponized, and redirected in order to either sell a product or sell an idea. And so that grievance is what we remapped this entire sector around.

3:34Marianna Spring:Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Christina Wilford. Just 216 influencers drove 14.6 billion views on Lookmax and content between 2024 and 2026 across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. That is such a small number of profiles with such a huge influence. It seems to indicate that social media as a whole is quite easily manipulated by small groups. So this, to our knowledge, is the first quantifiable figure around this Because I think that it's dismissed by, you know, anyone under or over 40, let's say, really underestimate some of these what might seem like, oh, just a TikTok gimmick is actually a massive movement that's coming to, I don't know, steal your son's future or manipulate his body.

4:26He's being sold ideas that he'll be accepted by society, that he'll have better outcomes, that he'll get laid more often. I mean, it's sort of ridiculous. And I found when I was talking about it, the ridiculousness of the situation by policymakers is often not understood because they don't understand the scale. And so we thought, let's look at the reach. And we took a very conservative view. We really looked at Luxmaxing itself as a hash, not adjacent, distorted. And from that figure, there's 216 influencers who are responsible for 14.6 billion views because it was designed to further escalate and carry this distortion to scale.

5:11And that's a predatory market that's been developed by the social media companies. So I am not necessarily trying to call out the individuals. They're making a lot of money. Some are. Some are being misled. Some have ideology. Some have ideology that's really not beyond how they can get rich or get laid. What I find so interesting about that number, like Mariana said, is social media kind of, it's meant to be social media. So when we look at something like Luxmaxing, it has the appearance of something that has naturally kind of come out of culture, out of young people, right? This is everyone's talking about Luxmaxing.

5:49This also reminds me of Andrew Tate as well, because it shows you how easily manipulated these algorithms are, right? Because with Andrew Tate, it was just like a few guys in a room who had cracked the algorithm and had managed to like pump out enough content and financially. to incentivize other clippers to pump out that content. And they made him the most famous person in the world overnight. So it seems like these algorithms are pretty surprisingly easy to manipulate. Yeah. And we focus, I think, too much on some of those personalities. This is a business model that was invented, normalized, and scaled on YouTube.

6:25Yet they just say like, oh, it's kick or rumble, all these other. We have better standards. Look at us. Well, this is conflict profiteering. And that's sort of my biggest walk away from seeing this in different contexts, that they are providing the essential means in which very little of this would happen organically on its own. And that's why the language in this research is really important because we have outdated language. I don't use the manosphere because it doesn't mean anything to me anymore. It was very important in the early stages for those who were studying political violence movements and incel culture to be able to understand and talk about red pill and different incentives because they were in different places for the men who are engaging with that.

7:13But now we need to step back and look and come up with new terminology that matches this moment and the way that grievances are exploited are really selling a very dire future for young men. So you talk about the monetization pipeline, one, aspirational recruitment, two, injection of grievance, three, monetization of trust. Could you explain that pipeline and maybe could you give an example of that? Well, I mean, I think that the look smaxing example is exactly, you know, the right one, right? So if we kind of go back to like, what do we even mean by a grievance? And why is it so much a part of the tinder, the material that lets this spread?

7:52It's a distortion of real pressures. And when I'm analyzing trends around men, I'm listening to what they're saying. And they are wanting to lean into what being a man means in many cases, strength, loyalty, protection. Those are not bad values. Those are being exploited, weaponized and redirected in order to either sell a product or sell an idea. And so that grievance is what we remapped this entire sector around. So this is economic betrayal grievance. You know, DEI took your job. Dating and relationships. Women's standards are impossible to meet. And feminism is teaching women to despise men.

8:36You're physically inadequate. Your face, your jaw, your height, your body determines your worth and you're losing before you start. The therapy is for the weak, you know, emotional suppression, you know, so all of these ideas are dangerous in their own right, but also adjacent to selling products and an idea and alpha bro membership. And so you see the way that this structure has been built that starts innocently. Maybe I'll find a video on my own. So that may have been an individual choice. But the next 10 jawline videos for that same kid was not his choice if the algorithm brought him there.

9:17So then if you go to the escalation, basically, pipeline would be where you get to the hard maxing. And so you're talking about, I never thought I was a political scientist, an analyst, I would be using these words, but you're talking about fall maxing, right? And this is a really dangerous, we can laugh about it, we can think, oh, is this really a trend? But if you look at men and surgeries, you look at the trend lines around the offline impact of this, it is real.

9:47Marianna Spring:Just on this point about the start of the pipeline and the kind of aspirational recruitment area, Christina, I think sometimes there's this misconception that people are just scrolling on their feeds and then they're served up like, you know, a really hateful video about women or something. And they're like, whoa, love this. And then they end up going deeper down that rabbit hole. Whereas I can imagine that a lot of the content that falls into that bucket is actually really quite normal, right? Like fitness, like what kinds of things are we talking about? Like how kind of almost ordinary can the initial bit of content someone sees be?

10:20Social media is ubiquitous in most of our lives and especially for young men and especially for the what we call very online audiences. So those innocent searches are just a fundamental part of life. But it's where do those go? So once some of these young men began following, whether it's like I'm looking for a gym and then suddenly you're adjacent to this ridiculous body dysmorphia or, you know, let's all take collagen. That's where sort of it goes into creating more of a loyalty, a fan base and the really trust to conversion in order to get to that product. whether that's a course, a membership program, something that is predatory in nature.

11:07It's very hard for young men to stop subscribing to some of these services that are hidden. There's predatory aspects, you know, built within all of this because the platforms provide the means in which to, you know, subsidize and they make a lot of money on it themselves. What if the social media companies said, and they might say this, they have said things like this, that if I seek out a video about changing my jaw to make it look more masculine, that's coming from me. You said the next 10 videos are not my choice because the algorithm is feeding to me. What if they said, you know, well, that is just us reflecting your desire and finding content for you in the same way Netflix shows you like five more comedy films because you showed you liked a comedy film.

11:51But what they show you is still based on the data they collected on you, whether you know you're giving that data or not. You know, we did a deeper dive into the fight typologies. And this is, I think, where mainstream media misses picking up on like, oh, apparently far right influencers are fighting with each other. Oh, they might, you know, weaken their base. And that's not what's happening online. They're all making money. And it's not the saturated audiences at the top of the funnel, the higher, more audience following. It's really the mid tier creators. like a clavicular. So when a clavicular was running around Paris on live stream, trying to sell himself and his wares, it looked by the response that Paris told him like where to go.

12:43But if you're looking behind the scenes, no, he made a lot of money because it's also opening up a new audience and the narrative response in mainstream media being critical of that affects in no way what's going on behind this monetization and building new audiences and finding ways in which to further, you know, lead men astray. Are there any other fights between influencers that you think are all about monetization? All of them are. So you could take something like the alpha contest, you know, we're going to fight each other. The emotional driver there is anxiety, you know, around status, status anxiety.

13:22And that's going to harden, you know, some of your loyal followers. It sort of will sort that. Then there's the faux conflict, you know, which is just for entertainment. And that's cross pollinating different audiences. Then there's the cancellation, you know, of people. So this is sort of this injustice narrative. And that's an audience redistribution. So if you look at it from what is the type of conflict that they're creating, right this is manufactured then what's the emotional driver you'll see the business payout in the result which is almost like a pyramid scheme in its structure because it has all the hallmarks of the same kind of sales pitch and conversion of trust to loyalty to product

14:09Marianna Spring:you're listening to the interview from the bbc world service

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15:07Marianna Spring:What struck me about Christina Wilford was her positivity. She was sitting in an empty office in the US, chatting to us over video call. You might expect her to feel jaded after analysing one of the most toxic corners of social media. But the way that she'd attempted to expose the tactics at play, the level of organisation she'd identified within what we usually refer to as the manosphere, and the empathy and understanding she showed for the people targeted by it, actually gave her hope. The better we understand online spaces and the influencers inhabiting them, and the better we understand the role of the social media platforms and the part their algorithms and designs play in this world, the easier it is to come up with solutions.

15:49Marianna Spring:The social media companies all have guidelines to limit the harm caused by this sort of content. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Christina Wilfore. Okay, so the other week when Clavicular got choked out by some random person... Which we discussed on Top Comment. Which we discussed on our podcast and HSTKey Talkies said he looked pathetic. Was that fight manufactured to create followers is artificial or is it just a byproduct? There's all sorts of formulas here that, in my judgment of how the ecosystem operates, are ultimately majority manufactured. It's not to say they don't have spontaneous or organic reactions to things, but their reactions are all in context to the business model that grows them more audiences or followers to distort.

16:38So if you could take the party bus incident as the example of that, when there were big influencers in one party van on their way to a club in Miami. Okay. Andrew Tate, clavicular, Sneeko. Nick Fuentes, fresh and fit, right? So everybody's right in there. It was the DEI of white supremacy. Because they were singing Heil Hitler. Yes. Thank you for saying, I don't want to repeat these. And what the heck is going on, right? The joke's on us. We downloaded that kickstream, you know, to better get a sense of like who benefited. And this is the formula that essentially the research reveals is that if you have audience saturation at the top, it is the mid-level creators who benefit from these conflicts and controversies.

17:28And then there's another episode, another, it's like watching reality TV in the form of influencers. And so their incentive is always to escalate, to get into the share of their audience, to look for more opportunities to go even further. And so that's a prime example who knows if they actually believe these things, what their real ideology is. But the sales pitch they've determined around this kind of dangerous rhetoric is beneficial to them, irregardless of whether it's a belief or not.

18:01Marianna Spring:When it comes to these mid-tier creators, because a lot of people listening will have obviously heard of the, you know, the most well-known creators in this world, people like Andrew Tate or Clavicula or HS Tiki Toki or what have you. But in the report, you actually mentioned some examples. You mentioned Hamza Ahmed, aka Adonis, who's got 2 million subscribers on YouTube. And you also mentioned Austin Wayne, who's got 200 ,000 TikTok followers. These are people that some listeners might not have heard of. How does this mid-tier creator level work? There are so many personalities that most people have not heard of that are coming to a social media platform near you.

18:41What we highlight in the report is only the tip of the iceberg. And I don't want to be the PR agent for far-right influencers. And so we use the examples of the personalities and the products and what they're doing, just as illustrative of the massive amount of different figures who are now entering this field. I think one of the course corrections is that maybe this is a Western phenomenon or this is specific to the U.S. No, this is globalized. And you can look at the 216 Luxemax scene figures and the individuals there from Turkey to Sri Lanka to Jordan, UK, United States, many, many countries.

19:23And so there are many future claviculars and others you've never heard of who are talking to your son and having a lot of influence on the discourse that people will be surprised by because the real structure of their ability to be seen is through modeling what they see in the influencer economy and wanting to be part of that. Is there any way out of this? Yes, there is. And the good news is you don't have to do a lot of new, wild, crazy things around technology to look at the solutions in the way products are sold and marketed. There's bad actors and snake oil salesmen throughout time. And so, you know, you develop law in which to make sure that products didn't have dangerous things that were marketed in different ways.

20:11Right. So the consumer bucket is really where I want to anchor much of this. I, for example, do not use the term sexualized deepfakes is too vague. It is a digital forgery, right? It's a forgery. Deepfake almost sort of softens it. Then you're questioning the choice of the individual rather than the distortion of the technology. So there's plenty to do when you look at it as a consumer problem. And then you start to look at the advertising, the revenue structures. You can regulate and have oversight to all of those. Don't believe what the platforms say. We have to have the political will to understand it is ours to resolve.

20:51And an individual being smarter about scams isn't going to get us there. It's going to be a policymaker who understands that the exploitation of their constituencies for harm is enough.

21:04Marianna Spring:I think it's interesting, this reframing of what's happening here, if that's the right way of putting it as fraudulent activity, as scamming. There's something, I guess, about the interface, the social media and digital interface, which has perhaps tricked people into thinking that that's not what it is. And when you're talking about this idea of fraud, what do we mean here in this world? It's like the courses, right, where they're basically getting people to sign up for stuff, but ultimately can't prove that they're giving them any value for their money whatsoever. Or is it like dodgy products as well?

21:36Marianna Spring:Yeah. What does the fraud constitute? Yeah, all sorts of things. So you've got, you know, the educational membership courses and things that are mostly information that's publicly available, but you're really trying to create loyalty that can build trust to conversion. Then you've got the harder pipeline to medical supplies. This is the peptides, the collagen. This is all the products and even meth as a way in which to improve your looks. It goes pretty far. So what we're trying to do is break down all of those, match it with the grievance, and then look at how they're monetizing so that we can disrupt that somewhere in the system and not leave it up to individuals who would have to otherwise try to figure out this on their own.

22:24And it's impossible because of, in some cases, the emotional connection that they have either to the person selling them the product or the idea that they've convinced them of around their grievance. So how much money are people making out of this mail grievance industry? Multi-millions. I mean, this is millions and millions. And often it's not even just the money exchange. They're also promoting cryptocurrency schemes and other things that are about hiding money. There's no way to put an overall monetization figure because the platforms aren't transparent. We should require them not only to tell us and show us, but we can see by their profits.

23:06Their advertising model is what keeps this going. And if we know that they're not even shutting down, even of the fraudulent advertising that's been proven, that this is baked into the system. So let's ask the platforms, how much is it that some of these male grievance figures are monetizing with their support and especially the share.

23:27Marianna Spring:And so the picture that the report is painting here is a kind of bunch of influencers, some more influential than others, all of whom kind of grafting away, looking to make money from these kinds of courses and products, but also actually from the monetization schemes that exist on the platforms themselves. But in some ways, they almost feel like the puppets, if that's one of a better word for like the big social media companies. I don't know. And Matt, you've spent enough time hanging out with these kinds of people, the lives they live don't seem nearly as glamorous and rich and extravagant as the ones they present.

23:57Marianna Spring:And there's that kind of almost quite like sad disconnect. Yeah, that's what we would call the kind of the guru scam, where you kind of present yourself as wealthy and aspirational to get people to sign up for a course. And then that course,$20 a month, whatever is how you actually become rich. So in sum, have I got this right, Christina? Is it Basically, there is a huge amount of money being made from both social media companies and these influencers off of making men feel terrible about themselves and off of driving a kind of gender based conflict, a cultural gender war within our society. Absolutely.

24:35That's a perfect way to say it. And the incentives are all to continue to escalate. And I think people have to consider in other parts of the world why this commercial marketplace being foisted on your country is acceptable. You know, we can look clearly at the owners. Their own grievances are often out on display. It's the sales pitch to create essentially now what they've created, which is the most powerful companies in the world who are coming to extract whatever they can, you know, from your young men in your lives.

25:12Marianna Spring:Thank you for listening to The Interview. You'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with Hunter Biden, the son of former US President Joe Biden, head of the World Meteorological Organization, Celeste Saulo, and independent Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. Until the next time, bye for now.