What teenagers really see on their phones

0:00Helen Pidd:This is The Guardian.

0:07Helen Pidd:Today, what it's like being a teenager online in 2026.

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0:59Helen Pidd:Hang on, I'll turn my brightness up. I'm in the bright and airy kitchen of a house in the south of England, and 15-year-old Abby is showing me her phone. And in particular, a post on Instagram that came up in her feed.

1:11Josh:What is it a picture of? So it's like a video of a car with a huge sort of basket of flowers on it. So obviously the flowers are being delivered to a girl. and the caption is all this to a girl who let another guy crack for free by the way

1:27Helen Pidd:all this to a girl who let another guy crack for free right translate translate for us okay so

1:35Josh:crack means to have sex with the way it works is that men do the cracking and women are cracked the moral of the story is that the man who's giving the flowers is like getting played essentially by the girl receiving them because she's making him like pay for sex whereas another man got it for

1:54Helen Pidd:free okay and let's look at some of the comments underneath here yes so the top comment with 42

2:00Josh:000 likes is one man's five year year relationship is another man's one night stand so essentially yeah saying that one man has to wait five years for sex while another man gets in one night the second top comment is only untouched women deserve this. Untouched meaning? Virgin women. Okay. Which is disgusting. Only untouched women deserve flowers. Love, yeah. Stop valuing women 2026 with 18 ,000 likes. Stop valuing women.

2:34Helen Pidd:Yeah.

2:38Helen Pidd:Abby tries to avoid this content, actively following women she admires and looks up to, but the misogyny always finds her.

2:47Josh:I get quite a lot of like feminist videos. And so I got this video of a woman who was talking about her sexual assault. The very top comment with over 100 ,000 likes is, who was your victim? Which is just terrible. Do you want me to read some more? Must have happened in the dark. Now imagine how your victim felt. Did you force him? Who's the unlucky guy? Brother was starving. Ignore the positive comments. Bro picked an easy target. Nobody gonna believe her. Bro had to choose either this or execution. Who lost the bet? Meant that dude was down bad.

3:32Helen Pidd:It's hard to listen to, isn't it? But this is what teenagers see online every single day. From the moment they wake up to when they go to bed at night and for hour upon hour in between. But do they want it to be this way? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Two teenagers, two smartphones and two very different online realities.

4:11Helen Pidd:anyone who has a teenager in their life will know just how closely they guard their phones but I'm here in Abby's kitchen because she's decided she wants adults to know what she's confronted with every time she opens up social media she recently wrote about it for the guardian in a piece that shocked even her own parents. Today, her warm and friendly mum welcomes me into the house, makes us a cup of tea and then leaves us to it. So can you start by telling me, when did you first get a smartphone?

4:40Josh:I think I was about 11 years old, maybe, which is quite young, but obviously all my friends had one and I begged my parents. So yeah, about 11, I think.

4:50Helen Pidd:How many restrictions, if any, did your parents put on? what you could use it for and how often you could use it.

4:57Josh:I'll be honest, my parents really didn't put that many restrictions on my phone. I mean, I had to like ask to download something, but they let me get TikTok and they didn't really put a screen time on my phone. But I think it's because most of my friends were the same. And so my parents talked to their parents and they just kind of let me. Are you supposed to be 13 to be on TikTok? Yes. Okay. So how did you get around that? um they don't check your age I mean obviously like with every app they make you put in your birthday but I just made up a random year so yeah it's very easy to join whatever age you are and a lot of users on TikTok are actually very young 10 11 12 and talk me through the kind of

5:39Helen Pidd:things that you were seeing at first when you were when you were scrolling on TikTok I think

5:44Josh:at first it was quite normal stuff just like relatable videos funny videos popular topics like makeup, fashion, lifestyle, although already even at 11 I was seeing videos of very beautiful girls who I assume were probably very highly edited. I do remember like very early on at 11 when I was first scrolling through TikTok and seeing these girls feeling negative about myself because of them. That was around the age where I first like actually stood in front of the mirror, look at myself, look at my features thinking, oh my nose is too big or oh like my cheekbones aren't showing enough, something like that.

6:20Josh:Yeah, it's really sad. Obviously, I feel quite like sad for my younger self. I was far too young to sort of comprehend that it wasn't realistic at all, that they were highly edited. So I did think that I should look like that. Before I had social media, I really never thought about what I looked like. I just tied my hair in a ponytail, like glanced in the mirror, didn't care, didn't think about it. But then after I downloaded it, I did definitely start to compare myself and think about what I looked like. Abby tells me about the first time she encountered misogyny online. I think I was about 11 or 12.

6:53Josh:I was very young. It was like very early into having TikTok. And I was scrolling and I saw this video of a woman who was exercising. I think she was doing some kind of tutorial, just showing off an exercise, squats or yoga, something like that. It was very, very normal. She was fully covered. Nothing wrong with the video. And I clicked on the comments. every single comment I saw it was from a man or a boy and it was just these disgusting comments about her body sexualizing her saying very explicit things pointing out like her private parts calling her like a whore and asking for it they dominated the comment section it wasn't just one or two disgusting men it was so many of them it was at night and I just felt so sick to my stomach I felt absolutely terrible and I think that moment really kind of cemented something in me.

7:42Josh:I just, I felt hatred for myself, my body, and I also felt hatred for the men and boys who are saying this, and as an extension, all men and boys.

8:02Helen Pidd:We keep hearing about an explosion of toxic masculinity that is driving boys and girls apart and sending their relationships back into the dark ages. A recent survey for King's College London found that more than 30 % of Gen Z men think that women should obey their husbands. 24 % think women should, quote, not appear too independent or self-sufficient. A lot of these ideas circulate on Snapchat, which is used by almost half of children aged 3 to 17, according to Ofcom. Abby used to have Snapchat, but she deleted it when she realised it was making her unhappy.

8:36Josh:The main issue with Snapchat is just kind of how it works with meeting boys and dating. The way you would meet boys on there is, I don't know, a random boy would text you or maybe you'd text them, you'd add each other. And immediately, the first question always asked would be, what do you look like? You'd have to send a photo, they'd send a photo back. They'd probably say, like, wow, you're fit or something. and also um I did get asked if I sent nudes quite a few times which is common it happens to all my friends that's the other big issue is snapchat it's very much like physical and you're 13 yeah 13 or 14 roughly right it was it was like usually boys my age but it would literally be like they text you and immediately they'd ask if you sent um obviously I never sent any nudes but yeah and have you ever had unsolicited pictures from boys i have i don't i have had some unsolicited pictures i don't know if it's necessarily boys it could be men although i'm sure it is boys too um but what are the pictures of well obviously like they're private parts actually i've had it okay but like i've talked to some of my friends apparently they get sent loads um actually there's this one awful thing that happened a few weeks ago that i heard about from my friend a girl in another school, her boyfriend made an AI nude photo of her best friend.

10:03Josh:He found a photo of her Instagram and then put it through some AI service and made it nude.

10:10Helen Pidd:I can't get over how casually Abby discusses what are, let's be clear, crimes. It is illegal to send unsolicited naked photos to an adult, let alone a child. So where are boys getting these ideas?

10:31Helen Pidd:I go to meet 16-year-old Josh, a GCSE student from Cambridgeshire, who has thought a lot about why boys are drawn to toxic masculinity online. He's now building a profile as a campaigner. Like Abby, he got his first smartphone before he started secondary school. And he says that watching what started off as motivational content ended up pushing him towards the manosphere.

10:52Abbey:I think it's important to remember that, in general, young boys and men are never going online onto a social media feed thinking okay today I want to be a misogynist right there are many entry points into the manosphere for me it was sort of what could be seen as rather innocent unsuspecting business content fitness content and that was my sort of entry point I think it was around 22 2023 where influencers like Andrew Tate what we'd now call manosphere influencers were on the rise and their target demographic was always young men i don't think i could open tiktok well at least i don't remember a time of opening tiktok and then not seeing his face within about 10 seconds you're not tired you're just undisciplined you're

11:39Helen Pidd:not lost you're just surrounded by cowards who've lied to you your entire life and deep down you know it you've been playing weak you've been living soft and every second you stay this way the man you were born to be dies a little more. So ask yourself, how much longer are you going to let your potential rot in silence? The videos Josh was watching showed a version of so-called peak masculinity.

12:01Abbey:Like supercars, you know, yachts, big muscular men in suits surrounded by women in Dubai.

12:06Helen Pidd:Take it from me, a billionaire, with Paganis and Bugattis and Yaskos and penthouses in the sky and homes all around the world and a yacht and a private jet.

12:17Abbey:Lots of lions as well. That's a big thing. Lions? Lions, yeah. And it sounds weird. Lions and wolves. A lot of the evolutionary biology about wolves, like the whole pack, leader of the pack, alpha, beta sort of thing, gets wildly misconstrued and projected onto humans. It gets applied to sort of make implications about societal structure and what's called the matrix and oppression inside of society.

12:45Helen Pidd:You need to find a way to some degree to escape the Matrix. And when I talk about the Matrix, it primarily applies to men because men are the backbone of the slave force. We always have been and always will be. And unfortunately now, if you're a law-abiding man inside the Matrix, your future and the life that is laid out for you is nothing but depressing. You're going to go to school, you're going to get in debt. The videos offered Josh a blueprint for a more successful life, more money, more power, the attention of the best looking women. but the image of masculinity they projected was unattainable particularly for a teenage boy

13:15Abbey:how did it make you feel it's very much framed as a if you are not meeting those sort of standards that they're portraying then you have failed and that's entirely your fault uh you're weak broke lazy so like the men that are meeting these standards that they're sort of like portraying and pushing out are referred to as like alpha males and they're sort of framed as like the leaders in society the ones with the the ones with the success the one the ones that sort of can access relationships and women and then you have the beta males below them and they're sort of framed as like the slaves to society the ones that aren't as successful with women so it's very hierarchical in nature and there's very much a feeling there that if you are not meeting the standards they're portraying then you are at the bottom of the hierarchy

14:16Helen Pidd:Let's talk about how girls and women were talked about by these men.

14:20Abbey:I'd say the messaging I came across was that men and women had very different roles in society. Women were almost designed in nature to be submissive to men. That as a man, it was your role to lead and provide. That you had to be dominant in a way.

14:36Helen Pidd:number one type of man that a woman doesn't cheat on the only way that you have the confidence to walk down the street not put up with a woman's bullshit not put up with most guys bullshit and the biggest thing that dominant men do and this is what is not talked about that women respect the most dominant men respect and value their own time there's concepts like the 80 20

15:00Abbey:rule which is that 80 of women are only attracted to the top 20 of men so if you're not meeting the standards that places you in the top 20 % then you're not going to be accessing relationships but there's also very much a framing of like you know women are only attracted to rich successful muscular men that is the standard if you're not meeting that then you're not going to be successful with women so it's it's not even necessarily a case of like outright misogyny it's also resentment that gets built up because you're being constantly told that women will only see you if you're like meeting specific standards.

15:35Helen Pidd:Did you think as a 13-year-old boy, oh God, I'm going to have to be really rich and muscly if I've ever got a hope of getting a girlfriend?

15:44Abbey:I'd say a part of it definitely resonated. And I saw part of it as truth, definitely, yeah.