The movement to keep certain technologies out of the hands of young people is gaining steam in Canada. Manitoba has announced plans to ban those under 16 from using both social media and AI chatbots. British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma has expressed support for a ban, and Nova Scotia, Quebec and Saskatchewan are considering similar measures.

Canada may even follow Australia’s lead by implementing a nationwide ban on social media for youth. The jury is still out on how well that will work. In the 1990s, as schools began building computer labs, they were often equipped with a content-filtering program called Net Nanny. With its simple text-searching approach, it prevented countless students from researching facts about breast cancer and even caused the U.K. town of Scunthorpe to vanish from online searches. Sites offering tips on how to disable Net Nanny became very popular among teens.

There is a corner of the Internet that has become particularly attractive to boys and young men. Usually dubbed the manosphere, it is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, which I found difficult to watch. It features muscular male influencers touting a harsh version of masculinity that often comes at the expense of girls and women. British filmmaker Louis Theroux went into the lairs of some hypermasculine types to see what makes them tick and how they make money to afford lavish lifestyles.

A recent commentary by Rehmatullah Sheikh on the menshealthfoundation.ca website describes the manosphere as “thinly veiled misogyny dressed up with Lamborghinis and swanky condos as ‘evidence’ that the methods work.” He argues that a subtle, seductive variety of manosphere content is invading the bedrooms and minds of boys and young men.

Professor Samuel Tanner of the Université de Montréal uses the term “sigma male” to describe this phenomenon. We are all familiar with the “alpha male,” who scores high on the LMS (looks, money, status) scale and is rewarded with sexual success. In an academic paper, Tanner writes that the “sigma male is self-centred, ambitious, adaptable and unconventional,” as well as self-sufficient and disciplined. He adds: “He knows how to please women but maintains a distant, cynical and cruel attitude toward them.”

Tanner found many examples of the sigma male personality in the more than 1,000 TikTok videos he analyzed. Humiliation of women is a recurring theme. He gives the example of a video prank in which “men approach women with a bouquet, hand it to them while they tie their shoelaces, then take it back once finished and continue on their way.” In addition to being rude and hurtful, Tanner argues this reflects a view of women as mere “supports” for a man, holding the flowers while he ties his laces.

There are a few positive messages associated with manosphere influencers. Hamza Ahmed encourages fitness and self-confidence. Jordan Peterson tells men to make their beds as a small win that creates a sense of order and agency. Even the much-reviled Andrew Tate advises his viewers to cut back on excessive gaming, pornography and scrolling.

Both my son, Jordan, and his wife, Paige Hilderman, have thought deeply about these issues. She works with students at Concordia University and sees firsthand some of the harmful effects of online communities. “Young boys are looking for community and identity,” they tell me. “And for those who do not find it in the real world, there is a lot of fairly harmless content easily accessible online. However, the algorithm pushes them toward more radical content.”

They say the danger, well documented in the literature, is that “teenage brains biologically can’t pull away or properly critique what they are seeing. They end up finding community and identity in harmful online spaces, and this shapes their actions in the real world.”

Of course, there are many other harmful communities on the Internet beyond the manosphere. Girls as well as boys can be persuaded to do terrible things. A tragic example is the story of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old from the U.K., whose death in 2017 was linked by a coroner to the harmful effects of online content and social media algorithms. A recently released Channel 4 documentary, Molly vs THE MACHINES, tells her story in tragic detail. Her father says, “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter.”

Just as young people found ways around Net Nanny, techniques are already circulating to bypass age-verification checks on sites that use them. In Australia, kids are flocking to platforms not included on the restricted list. While banning may have some benefits, if only to push children to engage more in the real world, it is not the real solution. We need to raise a generation that is genuinely skeptical of what they see online and ready to talk about it. The two films mentioned here, viewed at the right stage and age, could be powerful tools for starting that conversation.

Tom Keenan is an award-winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Calgary, and author of the best-selling book Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy.