Social Media Built a Market for Sexual Violence

A CNN investigation that revealed the intricacies of an online “rape academy” shocked the world last month. The report shone a light on the porn website Motherless, where 20,000+ videos under the “sleep” category, which features men raping their sleeping wives and girlfriends, had hundreds of thousands of views. In the comments of one of these videos, CNN reporters found a link to a chat room on Telegram called “Zzz”, where members trade advice on how to drug their partners before raping them, filming it, and uploading it to the internet.

The mass breach of trust between partners is staggering because it signifies extreme cruelty and dehumanization of women’s bodies. But these violently misogynistic corners of the internet are, unfortunately and painfully, the predictable result of a tech ecosystem designed by cisheterosexual men, in the context of unfettered capitalism and the continued entrenchment of gendered subjugation. It’s a horrifyingly and depressingly logical endpoint to how social media platforms and their incentive structures create tools that support and further ingrain societal hierarchies.

As long as the internet has existed, it has been used for sexual violence, sexual predation, the dissemination of mass misogyny with very little action taken by the creators of the plaforms to mitigate or stop the violence. It’s time to admit, once and for all, that the tech we work on every day thrives and profits off the subjugation of women—and the leaders in charge have no interest in changing that. There’s no middle ground to be found in this admission, no concession to the “good” things Silicon Valley has given us. The internet was built on a cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist capitalism, and it is accelerating and worsening violence against women.

In the past 30 years, violence against women and girls and institutionalized misogyny have walked hand in hand with technological innovations. It’s not a secret that incel and red-pill influencers and podcasters make thousands of dollars through the monetization of misogynistic content across social media, selling the hatred of women to lonely men who have been systematically disempowered by capitalism. The mass scapegoating of women and feminism as the root of all male pain is easily marketable. Yet it fails to address what causes disempowerment: the exploitation of the working class by the millionaires and billionaires creating the tools used to disseminate hate.

Today, these once-fringe communities have become mainstream because they make tech moguls money. Everything is expensive, we are all lonely, we are all losing our jobs to robots while tech giants hoard billions of dollars, and women are one of the sacrificial lambs. We will continue to be harmed at alarming rates until systemic patriarchy—including the tech tools and apps that enhance and accelerate its harm—is addressed.

Engagement at any cost

An example of how social media platforms prioritize engagement at all costs is the evolution of revenge porn and nudify apps. Revenge porn as we know it today—sexual content made nonconsensually and disseminated over the internet for the purposes of blackmail or public humiliation—has existed since 2000. Social media platforms have failed to filter out this kind of content, despite pressures from the public, survivor-victims, and feminist anti-sexual violence advocates. The rise of AI-powered nudify apps, which have the ability to create nude photos nonconsensually, meant that anybody could create nonconsensual nudes and share them without ever having a sexual encounter with the victim. Though advocates have been identifying this harm since it was first invented, regulatory policy has fallen behind.

Weeks before Elon Musk left the White House last May, his company decided to use this kind of gendered digital abuse to boost the popularity of his social media app X, according to a report by the Washington Post, xAI developers were told to loosen guardrails around sexual content. Months later, in January, an estimated 3 million sexualized images, 23,000 of which were of children, were generated in 11 days, according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Whistleblowers quoted by the Post said Musk was desperate to increase X’s popularity through embracing “sexualized material” by “rolling back guardrails on sexual material and ignoring internal warnings about the potentially serious legal and ethical risks of producing such content.”

Simply, Musk’s company was trying (and arguably succeeded) to boost engagement on its social media platform by allowing the proliferation of gendered violence. Like the “rape university” exposed by CNN, the plan for X’s relevancy depended on highly traumatic sexual violence, anonymous users abusing women and girls, and a rapid network formation around the violent sexualization of feminized bodies. These platforms train users to see women as objects, whose abuse is gamified as a male bonding exercise, lowering moral and psychological barriers to escalation. If all men are being violent and abusing women, then it becomes socially normative to do so yourself.

Men built an internet that scales behavior—good or bad, but mostly bad toward marginalized populations—without regard to harm. It is urgent that we stop treating revelations about the harm it is causing with surprise, like it’s a glitch in the system. The internet is functioning exactly as it is supposed to.

The duality of masculinity

There is a duality that patriarchy teaches men to perform. At the same time that men’s dominance depends on their ability and willingness to harm women and girls to keep them submissive in the societal order, they are also told that they are our protectors and providers. Privately, they are expected to degrade and subjugate women; publicly, they act as the good guys. It’s the other, “bad” men who commit the harm. The internet allows this paradox to thrive, as anonymity of users removes reputational risk and misogynistic communities normalize this kind of behavior.

The “rape university” is perhaps the best example of how this duality functions on the compartmentalization of the harm enacted by men: by day, these men were long-term partners to their wives and girlfriends, by night, they violated them. The same can be said about red-pill communities: many men claim red-pill content is about self-improvement, about seeking a long-term submissive partner while degrading any woman who does not fit their sexist standards, while degrading and harassing women they see as “low value” and using women’s labor to make absurd amounts of money.

When red-pilled men finally find a woman who will submit to them, they act like gentlemen and protectors of those women, the “good” ones, specifically. Accountability for harm is nowhere to be seen, only big checks from brand deals and platform monetization, as other men are taught to do the same on a global scale.

When I reported on Grok’s nudifying capabilities back in March, experts told me that legal frameworks have not been able to keep up with technological advances. Additionally, Big Tech lobbying allows platforms to consistently avoid liability without transparency. A 2025 report by Corporate Europe Observatory argued that experts and civil society members are “out-numbered, under-funded, and struggling in the face of corporate dominance.”

There is a way out, but it requires that we change everything about how tech is created, maintained, and regulated today. Experts have said, again and again, that social media platforms should be proactive about detecting harmful, misogynistic content, rather than waiting for a reactive public to report it. The concept of safety by design, where security and privacy are embedded in how a tech product works, could prevent gendered abuse, as well as establish guardrails around virality of harmful content.

To incentivize this kind of product design, policymakers need to develop frameworks that actually hold tech companies accountable for what their products allow users to do. Tech CEOs, developers, and engineers must be liable and held accountable for what happens once their creations are released for mass usage. Without regulation, they will continue to release products that slowly worsen our collective mental health, trust in others, and traumatically change lives.

On a systemic level, men must also be proactive in reckoning with patriarchy and how they benefit from it and perpetuate it, online and offline. Actively disrupting misogyny and sexism is urgent, an action that might feel uncomfortable in the moment but might actually save lives. Men need to call out friends who are being seduced by misogynistic content, they need to intervene in spaces where violence against women and objectification of women’s bodies is normalized. We need allies in this fight, otherwise nothing will ever change—and when the next exposé is published, we will be right back where we are now.