Students at William Ellis and Parliament Hill School won a council award for their documentary

THE “rabbit holes” of social media can push young men towards violent or misogynistic material – but students can be taught “tools” to prise back control.

This is one of the messages students at William Ellis School took away from a recent “Counter Don’t Cancel” project interrogating masculinity, misogyny, and the pressures that surround life as a teenage boy.

Working in partnership with Middlesex University, older pupils at the Dartmouth Park boys’ school ran a series of workshops with Year 8 students to explore the malign influence of social media influencers like Andrew Tate.

Tate is a former kickboxer who rose to prominence on social media with misogynistic messages that charities have suggested could radicalise young men. He has denied wrong-doing after recently being charged with rape and human trafficking in Romania.

Students learned how social media algorithms can work to push more and more of the same kind of content to viewers who show even the slightest flicker of interest. Watching one Andrew Tate video can quickly lead social media users to see more.

According to headteacher Izzy Jones, students explored “how [social media] might take you down certain rabbit holes without you even realising, how it exposes you to ideas that you may not have sought out.”

Students were taught to be “conscious” users of social media, and Ms Jones said they discussed “the language to counter those ideas”.

She added: “How do they respond to that in a way that’s forceful, articulate and challenging? One of the important things about that day was not to say to students: ‘all of these ideas are wrong, and these are the things you mustn’t do’, but actually, in order to become an empowered young citizen and a teenage boy who wants to make the world a better place, here are the tools that you can use.”

She added that online influencers who trade in misogyny are not “speaking in isolation” and restricted to the case of Andrew Tate.

“We’re talking about a wave of public figures including politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who have taken liberties to speak in a way that promotes shock and intolerance,” Ms Jones said. “We’ve got Donald Trump making reference to his treatment of women in a certain way, then winning an election to one of the most powerful offices in the world. Andrew Tate comes along and isn’t as shocking as he would have been if Donald Trump hadn’t been elected,” she said.

Building on this work, students at William Ellis and Parliament Hill School have recently produced a short documentary exploring “what it means to be a teen in 2023.”

In the film, students discuss the impact of social media on mental health, the safety of young women and girls, and the pressures of “toxic masculinity” for young men.

The film won a competition at the Town Hall last week as part of the council’s “Youth Safety Week”.

Awards were presented by Keir Starmer who said he found watching the film “humbling.”

According to Ms Jones, both projects were student-led.

“There’s a desire to talk about those things in a way that they can be part of the solution rather than the assumption that they’re part of the problem,’ she said.