IT starts innocently enough.
A relationship podcast here, a motivational video there, and perhaps a few clips offering advice on how to look more attractive or become more successful.
Individually, these videos might seem harmless, just another part of the endless stream of content that fills our social media feeds.
But what happens when the same messages about how men and women should look, behave and live keep appearing, over and over again?
Researcher Farhan Shahmi, one of the filmmakers behind the short documentary ‘The Gendered Feed’, says algorithmic harm does not always happen in a vacuum.
Recommendation algorithms could repeatedly expose users to particular ideas about gender without necessarily pushing them toward increasingly extreme content in a straightforward manner.
Instead, the messages may appear intermittently, mixed with entertainment, humour and other seemingly unrelated videos.
“If hundreds of small pieces of content repeatedly tell a young man that his value comes from being dominant, like, 'I have to be financially successful or emotionally invulnerable,' or it repeatedly tells a young woman that her job is to look desirable for men, to understand men or to protect herself from men and manage relationships correctly, then these messages can start to feel normal,” he says.
The concern, he explains, is not necessarily that any single video is inherently dangerous.
A video encouraging men to provide for their partners could appear motivational, while a beauty transformation video might be regarded as entertaining or inspirational.
However, the cumulative effect of repeatedly encountering similar messages could reinforce rigid expectations of masculinity and femininity.
Meanwhile, activist Ain Husniza Saiful Nizam, the other filmmaker behind The Gendered Feed, expresses concern about how such expectations could contribute to the normalisation of misogyny and violence against women.
She drew parallels with the concept of rape culture, in which seemingly minor behaviours, such as sexist jokes and the humiliation of women, could create an environment where more serious forms of violence were excused or minimised.
Normalising such behaviours, she adds, could also make people more willing to excuse perpetrators or blame victims when violence occurs.
Social media is another space where these attitudes could be reproduced and reinforced, Ain explains.
For example, during her research for the documentary, she encountered many AI-generated videos depicting female characters being cheated on, humiliated or subjected to violence.
Although presented as entertainment, Ain believes the repetition of such narratives risks making the mistreatment of women appear ordinary.
She also points to online communities associated with the ‘manosphere’, where young men are exposed to narratives portraying them as victims of an unfair society or suggesting they were entitled to women’s attention and acceptance.
Such beliefs, she says, could encourage resentment towards women, particularly among boys who already felt isolated or rejected.
However, Ain cautions against directly attributing individual acts of violence to exposure to manosphere content without evidence.
Farhan similarly stresses that radicalisation could not be reduced to watching a single video.
“Nobody becomes radicalised just by seeing an AI fruit video. Nobody becomes radicalised and wants to be a misogynist after just seeing one podcast about a relationship.
“There is a support system around them that has the potential to enable these sort of harmful behaviours and attitudes,” he says.
Ain says young people who feel lonely, misunderstood or unsupported could turn to online communities for a sense of belonging.
In some cases, these spaces offered explanations for their frustrations that reinforced harmful beliefs about gender.
“They feel lonely, they feel misunderstood, so then they go online and they consume content that makes them feel understood,” she says.
Ultimately, Farhan says users need to recognise that even a highly personalised social media feed does not necessarily reflect reality.
“Your (social media feed) can sometimes feel incredibly personal.
“But it is still, at the end of the day, a system making predictions about you,” he says.
