Ex-Love Island star Georgia Harrison has issued a stark warning to parents about the so-called “manosphere” - claiming it is “making teenage boys angry” and turning online misogyny into a cash machine.
The 31-year-old reality TV star turned campaigner says the battle against misogyny online starts with understanding who is making money from it - and how teenage boys are being targeted.
Harrison, who shot to fame on Love Island in 2017 after first appearing on The Only Way Is Essex, has in recent years become known for her work campaigning on online safety and abuse. She waived her right to anonymity after an intimate video was shared without her consent, a case which later resulted in a prison sentence for her ex-partner.
She has since worked with the government on online harms and was awarded an MBE for her services to victims of image-based abuse. Now she has turned her attention to the “manosphere” - a loose web of influencers, accounts and communities which push extreme anti-women views under the banner of “male self-improvement”.
On Friday (June 19), Harrison took her message directly to Downing Street, where she directly confronted UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and challenged policymakers. Simultaneously, she published an extensive, hard-hitting op-ed detailing her warnings via The Sun newspaper.
She wrote: “At the beginning of the week I stood in Downing Street and asked Keir Starmer about the manosphere. The organised, money-making machine pumping misogyny into the phones of teenage boys every single day.
“But I’ve thought about this for years, not days. I’ve lived it.
“The men getting rich from this aren’t hiding. You know their names.
“They sell the courses, the subscriptions, the merchandise - and the angrier they make your son, the more they earn. Around them sits a quieter machine: The algorithms that push them, the platforms that carry them, the advertising money that rewards the outrage because outrage keeps people watching.
“It is a business. We should start treating it like one.
“And underneath all that sits the everyday cruelty. People who believe they can post anything, about anyone, and never answer for it, hiding behind a screen and a fake name and a feeling that the rules don’t reach them.
“I know what it is to watch your own private life passed around by strangers.” Harrison argued for basic online responsibility, saying: “You own what you do” and that what you post about someone else - “the lies you spread, the images you share without consent” - should be treated as seriously as anything done offline.
She further stressed it’s “Not censorship. Not the nanny state.
“Just the accountability we teach our own children”. She also insisted companies that profit from harmful content must act “quickly, and by default”.
It’s framed as a cross-party, family issue: “This isn’t a left or right idea. It’s a parent idea,” with a call to stop children being “hunted, shamed or sold a poisonous version of what a man or a woman is meant to be”.
The “manosphere” is a broad online ecosystem of websites, forums, podcasts and social media accounts pushing ideas around hyper-masculinity, anti-feminism and so-called “red pill” thinking. Common themes include claims society favours women at men’s expense, pop-culture language about “waking up” to the “truth” about relationships, and influencers flaunting wealth and dominance to project status, while selling paid subscriptions, “alpha male” courses and private communities aimed at insecure young men.
Louis Theroux explored it in the Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.
