Boys, bans and the problem we're not solving
Highlights
- ACU Professor Laura Scholes says that social media algorithms can direct young men from innocuous content toward increasingly extreme material promoting hyper-masculinity, rigid gender norms and unrealistic body ideals.
- Australia's world-first social media ban for under-16s does not address the underlying issue of young people lacking the critical literacy skills needed to evaluate harmful ideologies encountered online, according to Professor Scholes.
- The book Boyhood in the Digital Age advocates for teaching "evaluative critical literacy" as a more effective long-term response than platform restrictions alone.
Laura Scholes was watching a close family member spiral into something she couldn’t quite reach. Spurred on by social media, this young man started hitting the gym obsessively, scrolling through fitness influencer posts and comparing his body to physiques that rival those of comic book heroes.
Despite his best efforts, he wasn’t seeing the progress he had hoped for. His self-image began to spiral.
“He was getting really depressed,” recalls Scholes, Professor of Gender and Literacy in the Digital Age at ACU’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education. “He started to develop quite a deficit view of himself.”
Eventually this family member recognised what was happening. He started a digital detox, stepping back from the platforms that were feeding him a narrow vision of manhood. Now in his mid-20s, he’s studying psychology, having experienced firsthand how social media can shape – and harm – the mental health of boys and young men.
It’s precisely these kinds of struggles that have driven Professor Scholes’s recent work. Her new book Boyhood in the Digital Age, co-authored with Dr Garth Stahl and Dr Sarah McDonald, arrives at a moment of heightened anxiety about the effect social media is having on young males – just as Australia implements its policy forcing firms to block users aged under 16 from having accounts on their platforms.
But while governments have reached for bans and restrictions, Professor Scholes and her colleagues argue for something more sophisticated: teaching children and adolescents the critical literacy skills to navigate digital spaces safely.
In their timely book, they draw on research into social media, gaming cultures and online communities in an effort to move past the crisis narrative currently dominating the issue.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of shutting down of opportunities and experiences for young people,” said Professor Scholes in early 2026, not long after Australia’s world-first policy took effect.
“Yes, social media platforms need to take more responsibility, but we also need to be advancing young people’s critical literacy because they live in a digital world that’s accelerating rapidly.”
Moreover, she questions what happens when the young people who have been cut off from social media suddenly gain unrestricted access at 16.
“Sixteen is not very old, and a lot of the mental health issues we’re seeing with young men are happening at an older age, when they’re in university and in the workforce.”
The underlying issue, she adds, is that many young people lack the skills needed to critically evaluate the ideologies being sold to them online.
“My fear is that policies that aim to lock young people out from social media don’t address that issue.”
Amplifying age-old views
In their book and her recent research, Professor Scholes and her colleagues document how social media has amplified some age-old ideas around manhood.
Female body image issues have existed for decades. Nowadays, social media has led to increasing pressure on men to live up to outdated gender norms and hyper-masculinity. With the rise of the ‘manosphere’, the images flooding feeds tend to promote a narrow, rigid ideal: white, straight, muscular, wealthy, dominant.
“Traditionally it’s been women who’ve been encultured into this idea that they have to be thin and beautiful,” says Professor Scholes, whose previous work has explored the harms of gender norms and stereotypes. “Today, more and more young men are being fed the idea that they have to be white and straight and attract women and have money and be lean and strong.”
The consequences are measurable. Male cosmetic procedures have surged, with a 19 per cent increase in male breast surgery in the past two decades. Steroid use among young men has also escalated, as has the use of performance-enhancing drugs and age-reducing procedures.
These unrealistic ideals are promoted online through influencers, aided by social media algorithms designed to keep people scrolling.
“Once a young person clicks on something,” Professor Scholes says, “it might even be something innocuous like a post about gaming or something lifestyle-related, but the algorithms can take them to more extreme content because they think that’s going to keep the user engaged.”
What concerns Professor Scholes is the process where many of the normal identity struggles teens face are being pathologised.
“Some of those regular struggles and insecurities around identity that tend to happen in adolescence are being medicalised into a problem,” she says.
“Exploring and finding identity is a process where boys will try out different ways of being a man, and instead, they’re being fed an easy fix.”
That fix comes with a price tag. Influencers sell programs, supplements and subscriptions. They promote ‘looksmaxxing’, where physical attractiveness is maximised through workouts, supplements and fashion trends.
When young men fail to achieve the filtered, enhanced bodies they see online, platforms might feed them checklists that diagnose conditions, linking them to more products and programs.
This formula has proven to be alluring for many boys and young men. Some the most successful male influencers combine ostensibly positive messaging around fitness and self-improvement with misogyny and extreme masculinity, Professor Scholes says.
“It’s popular because it gives some young people a way of being a man, including some good content and messages around regular exercise, eating well, getting out there and doing something with your life,” she says.
“But that’s often mixed in with other toxic messaging that can be really harmful, and that’s how many of these young boys are learning to be a man. It’s appealing to them, and with some of these influencers becoming so popular, the manosphere is really escalating and causing many of the problems we’re seeing.”
Not passive victims
Yet Professor Scholes is careful not to frame boys as passive victims of digital platforms.
Throughout Boyhood in the Digital Age, young men are presented as capable of resisting harmful norms – if they’re given the right tools. This deliberately shifts the focus away from ‘crisis in masculinity’ narratives towards a more empowering perspective.
“Not all boys take on these harmful ideologies,” she says. “A lot of boys do reject them and talk about how they reject them.”
So, how do we support that rejection? The answer may lie in what Professor Scholes calls “evaluative critical literacy” – teaching young people to actively interrogate the information they encounter online.
“They need to understand how to evaluate these messages,” she says. “What’s the source of the information? Who is benefitting? What is the message telling me about masculinity? What harm or help comes from that?”
This requires both media literacy and an understanding of algorithmic bias, recognising that the primary role of recommendations on social media sites is not to serve the most relevant or reliable content – it’s to maximise engagement.
