Experts Prime Time have spoken to are concerned that perceptions of masculinity held by significant numbers of young men are being shaped and distorted by negative narratives and communities online.
Some fear that influencers who promote types of masculinity which involve disparaging or dominating women are connecting with young men who feel disconnected from communities or are struggling to find their place in society.
The loose digital ecosystem of influencers and communities - often called 'The Manosphere' -stretches from self-help gurus and dating coaches to anti-feminist forums.
In recent years, with everything from Andrew Tate to Netflix’s 'Adolescence', the topic has ballooned in public prominence.
So, why is 'The Manosphere' drawing in some young men - and what can be done to help them avoid or emerge from its influence?
Donegal man Rob Mulhern was in his mid-20s when one of his closest friends died. In the fog of grief, he turned to YouTube for distraction and help.
"I started getting these self-help videos from Jordan Peterson. Some of it made sense," Rob says.
Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and author, rose to prominence offering guidance on responsibility, order, and masculinity. He has drawn criticism from some for his views on gender and social hierarchies.
At first, Rob says, the advice felt comforting. However, over time, he says other content he was being recommended by the algorithms online became angrier and more confrontational.
"I'd been searching for things I could do, self-help related stuff because I'd never experienced such grief before," he says, "but it didn't help me grieve. It made me bitter."
What began as a self-help journey became a worldview shaped by frustration and division.
"All this happened within four or five months," he says.
That entry point opened the door to a wider world of podcasts and video clips in which the line between self-improvement advice and socially polarising commentary became increasingly hard to distinguish.
"I got served many videos from some of the most lunatic accounts. A lot of Joe Rogan videos and a lot of those phoney scientists he has on," Rob said.
"I was consuming hours of it. I started spouting lines just to feel like I was winning arguments.
"I was talking so much about this stuff that it was pissing everyone off around me, mostly women, and I didn't know why," he says.
"But yeah, there was an antagonistic element to it - I was winding people up all the time about it. I was being a confrontational dickhead ... but deep down, I was just confused."
Stories like Rob's, where feelings of loss or loneliness morph into online ideology, are not uncommon. For author and researcher, Richard Reeves, they are a symptom of something deeper.
A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Mr Reeves published 'Of Boys And Men' in 2022.
The book, which was hailed by The Economist and New Yorker magazines, has since been described as recommended reading by former US president Barack Obama.
He says a failure to address what he sees as a growing crisis among boys and young men has created a dangerous vacuum - one increasingly filled by online "reactionaries" offering simplistic answers to complex questions about masculinity, identity, and belonging.
"What's happening is that a lot of boys and young men are seeking an answer to the question of 'How am I supposed to be today? What does it mean to be a man?'" Mr Reeves told Prime Time.
"Too many boys and young men feel like they can't talk about these issues as it is ... So, if we add to that sense of alienation, that just drives them further into the arms of the reactionaries online," he added.
When that sense of alienation drives them online, they're not just finding community - they are often entering algorithmically curated spaces that can quickly steer them towards more extreme content, according to experts.
Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, a digital culture researcher at University College London and author of Smartphone Nation, has studied how some social media platforms shape what young people see, and how a search for guidance can evolve into exposure to polarising narratives.
"Often when people are fed harm online it is because they are looking for answers to what they perceive as a loss of control," Dr Regehr says.
"What social media is very good at is answering questions about a loss of control, giving answers, and directing blame," she added.
READ: 'Bubbling up': Teachers on how online content is shaping teens
"What social media does is it figures out how to keep you engaged, and the best way to keep you engaged is through emotional arousal. Often that is through outrage, often that is through hate, and that is what keeps you watching."
And that influence doesn't necessarily stay online.
"Social media has changed the way we think. It changes the way we access and process information. I would argue that to change the way we think is to change us, and we should be very worried about this," Dr Regehr said.
So, what's driving young men to seek meaning and male role models online in the first place?
In his book, Reeves explores what he describes as the 'modern male malaise': a collective drop in educational achievement, worsening mental health, and a loss of social purpose.
"A lot of boys and men have real problems. Those are not the confections of the so-called manosphere, they're real. In mental health, in education, etc," he told Prime Time.
"Across most of the world... in richer countries like the UK, in Ireland, the US, Western Europe, most of the education gaps now are the ones where boys are behind," Mr Reeves said.
In the US, Mr Reeves points out that nearly 60% of college students are women, with men falling behind at every stage of the education system.
A not dissimilar pattern is evident in Ireland, where women accounted for around 55% of all students enrolled in higher education in 2022, according to the Higher Education Authority - a rise of 5% since 2016.
The proportion of male graduates in Ireland has declined over the same period, from 46.8% in 2016 to 43.5% in 2022.
This marks a significant shift since 1970, when there were just 54 women in third-level education in Ireland for every 100 men, according to UNESCO.
For most people, this shift represents a long-overdue rebalancing after centuries of gender inequality, a point Richard Reeves agrees with, while warning that progress for men and women doesn't need to be mutually exclusive.
"We have to think about gender gaps both ways. The gender equality project has to include boys and men. It's a difficult conversation to have, but it's a necessary one," Mr Reeves says.
Referring to US data, he says "we did care about the gaps in the 70s when they were the other way around. The question is, why wouldn't you care about them now?"
While education is an area Mr Reeves says requires urgent attention, he also points to persistently high male suicide rates as a key driver and symptom of the crisis.
"When the online reactionaries come along and say, 'They don't care about you' - 'they' being the government, the media, etc - they sound plausible because we are not doing a good enough job of showing that we do care," he told Prime Time.
In the US, deaths by suicide are at the highest level in the nation's history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose data indicates males are three to four times more likely to die by suicide than females.
It's a broadly similar picture in Ireland, where men accounted for 78% of the 521 deaths by suicide recorded in 2021, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
"People fear that talking about the problems of boys and men somehow takes away from women and girls - that we can't do two things at once, that it's a zero-sum game. I think that's a very dangerous idea," Mr Reeves said.
He believes the problems of loneliness, emotional isolation and suicidal ideation are tied to the emergence of prominent influencers and online communities which espouse a distorted form of masculinity to young men.
Yet he warns that the way society responds to people who take initial steps into that digital world can be damaging in itself.
"There's a slight danger that any boy that's encountered any of this content or is asking these questions is immediately cast out as a potential incel, etc. That just drives them further into the arms of the reactionaries online."
Incel is short for 'involuntarily celibate', a label used by - or applied to - some men online.
They are considered to be a polarised subculture of the wider 'Manosphere'.
Like others within the Manosphere, those who identify with the label of 'incel' say that modern men are under attack from feminism, changing societal norms, and political correctness.
While Manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate encourage followers to "dominate" women in relationships, incels believe they cannot successfully form such relationships due to what they believe is women's overinflated expectations for potential male partners.
In short, they believe women will never be attracted to them because they do not have certain physical traits or social status - as a result they believe they are doomed to lifelong loneliness and rejection.
They refer to adopting or accepting this self-perception as 'taking the Black Pill'.
William Costello, who is originally from Milltown in Co Galway, is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas in Austin who researches the psychology of people within the incel subculture.
"At first glance, it may be difficult to understand what they get out of the identity," he says, "but when you think about it further, they actually perceive a lot of positives: a victimhood identity, a sense of fraternity, a common enemy, and an excuse to no longer participate in what they see as an anxiety-inducing dating market."
The result, he says, is often a mixture of misogyny, resentment, loneliness, depression and, in some cases, suicidal ideation.
"A lot of their rhetoric and ideological beliefs are very misogynistic," Mr Costello said.
"Incels are massively antagonistic, and they say some of the ugliest things, but really poor mental health often looks quite ugly. It doesn't look warm and fluffy. It often looks like aggression, particularly in men," he added.
While incel culture occupies one of the more extreme corners of 'The Manosphere', Mr Costello believes that how society engages with the issues its followers face - loneliness, rejection, poor mental health - can go a long way towards addressing the broader crisis affecting many young men.
"Even if you don't have sympathy with incels themselves, if your only concern is their external misogyny and how they harm other people, still - helping with their mental health is probably the best route to help with that," Mr Costello said.
That crisis in mental health is exactly what Richard Reeves works to draw attention to - not to excuse harmful behaviour, but to understand the conditions that can give rise to it.
"We've spent too long seeing boys and men as being the problem rather than as having problems," he says.
"Failing to honestly talk about these issues is what empowers [reactionaries], not talking about them."
Yet along with addressing the issues, according to Dr Regehr, must be a reckoning with the technology that promotes much of the harmful content being fed to boys and men online.
"I think that we need to attack the misogyny that is being targeted at young boys on the digital space. I think the fact that this content is being fed so readily is deeply problematic," Dr Regehr said.
"What my work has looked at is what we call the attention economy. Hate, harm, and disinformation can be algorithmically prioritised because it is more attention-grabbing," she added.
That prioritisation isn't just ideological, it's shaping how young people see each other, she says.
"We need to explain to young people that you're being fed this content because of this unethical corporate structure. This is forcing us apart. This is polarising us and boys and girls are being polarised against each other."
For Rob Mulhern, who found his worldview reshaped after searching for solace following the death of his friend, those conversations came too late.
What started as a search for guidance turned into hours of online content that led him down the path of confrontation, anger and ultimately self-reflection.
"I just realised I've been brainwashed by a load of nonsense online ... I was so disgusted and ashamed of myself," Rob says now, looking back at that period of his life.
While he says he never lost himself entirely, he acknowledges it took years to fully reckon with what he'd been drawn into.
"This all happened in about six, seven, months, roughly. And it took me maybe three, four years to really fully understand everything I understand now. I've grown, I hope, to some degree."
He said he's speaking publicly in the hope that others will recognise how their views have been warped, and consider the potential for change.
In-depth coverage of the impact of negative masculinity influencers from the RTÉ Current Affairs Digital Unit and Prime Time continues across the week online and on television, with a special programme on the 22 May edition of Prime Time.
