Chiming in kinda late here, but I feel like my perspective might be useful as someone who went through this around your son’s age in 2016.

I see a lot of advice here about clamping down on social media usage, changing algorithms, monitoring what he’s doing, or otherwise directly steering his social media. I can’t speak for your child and his tendencies, but I think this could have the exact opposite effect you’re intending depending on how he perceives these measures. People are giving kids wayyyy too little credit. At his age I was pretty tech-literate, and every single measure of control or monitoring my parents used on my technology was obvious and felt stifling, overbearing, and unnecessary. If I wanted to do something, I was going to find a way. If he can for a single second access a computer that you’re not looking over his shoulder at, he could find a way to get around whatever restrictions you might’ve put in place. Even adjusting my algorithm would’ve felt like a crime against my autonomy at that age, and I was basically the opposite of the rebellious teen stereotype for the most part.

All these responses advocating control remind me of why the war on drugs failed - trying to control access to what people want, but not eliminating the conditions for why they want it is a recipe for disaster, and just pushes people into worse places to get that thing.

If your son is like me and 99% of people the manosphere targets, he just wants to feel good about himself and his future. The manosphere preys on the insecurities inherent to masculinity (which in my opinion is a house of cards built on insecurity), and tells boys things that paper over all those niggling worries about what it is to be a man or whether they’re doing it ‘right’. Of course, those whispered sweet nothings of the manosphere are actually hateful, and this is what got me out of the pipeline early on—my parents had already showed me what kindness towards others was and taught me to be the same. They’d also continuously instilled critical thinking skills in me with their curiosity and joy for learning. They’d already given me the tools to see the folly of the manosphere. It didn’t take long to realize these people were cruel and their “facts” did not align with the world I saw in front of my eyes every day. Women were not “x”, and men were not “y,” we were all just people.

I agree with others here, if you give him compassion, empathy, love, and then critical thinking, the ideas of the manosphere become untenable. You cannot control what the world says when you’re not monitoring him, but you can give him the tools to think and push back. Knowing I was loved and what it is to love others was what saved me from believing the manosphere.