Observations about Adolescence its' message and where we might go.
Adolescence reveals a terrifying truth: smartphones are poison for boys’ minds
Martha Gill
When a Netflix drama highlights how online influencers can turn a teenager into a killer, it’s time to rethink social media
Sun 23 Mar 2025 18.00 AEDT
Every so often, a television drama comes along that has the power to change things. Last year, it was ITV’s
Mr Bates vs The Post Office, in which the plight of subpostmasters was rendered with
such success that it actually hastened in real-world legislation to compensate them.
And now we have Netflix’s
Adolescence, which looks at the online radicalisation of young boys by men’s rights activists (MRAs) such as Andrew Tate. Last week, Keir Starmer told the Commons he had been watching the series with his family and that it portrayed an “emerging and growing problem”
that needed to be tackled. Now MPs are examining ideas to address the issue with greater urgency.
It probably shouldn’t work like this. Policy decisions would ideally not hinge on the quality of an actor’s performance (
Adolescence had some spectacular ones, which explains its success), and whether politicians manage to catch the latest Netflix series. It makes us look a little emotionally incontinent, as a country, when the decisions of TV drama commissioners weigh quite so heavily in our politics. But the fickle spotlight of political attention has landed here, for now.
The issue of rising misogyny among young boys, fuelled by online influencers, has long been troubling. If we are approaching a point that action might be taken, that is a good thing. But what should that action be? There are, roughly, two lines of thought.
One is that the problem stems from an unfulfilled need among these young men – a lack of guidance, or self-esteem or of other men on which to model themselves. That was the central contention of
Gareth Southgate’s Dimbleby lecture last week. He talked of an “epidemic of fatherlessness” and the fact that boys are spending less time at youth centres and sports events where they might have met the kinds of aspirational figures Southgate looked up to: coaches, youth workers and teachers. Without this, he said, boys are driven on to the internet “searching for direction”, where they stumble on role models who “do not have their best interests at heart”.
As tech geniuses devote their brainpower to keeping people engaged, algorithms are getting smarter, and online life more exciting
The other argument is that the poison starts and ends with the influencers themselves: these men are so compelling they can radicalise boys who are otherwise well looked after and have plenty to do. This is the thesis at the heart of
Adolescence. Its central character is a boy drawn into MRA culture, which eventually persuades him to kill – but he also comes from an ordinary family, with a loving father and many male role models around him. There is no trauma in his life, no abuse. As the
writer, Jack Thorne, puts it: “He comes from a good background, like me; he’s a bright boy, like I was. The key difference between us? He had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.”
When a Netflix drama highlights how online influencers can turn a teenager into a killer, it’s time to rethink social media