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When political violence strikes a marginalized community, the institutional response follows a well-worn script.

High-visibility police cruisers temporarily flank the perimeters of local houses of worship. Press conferences dominate the news cycle. Public officials deploy localized, sanitizing language: “isolated incident,” “troubled individuals,” “suspected hate crime.”

Authorities waste invaluable time compensating for catastrophic systems failures and patching outdated bureaucratic protocols. And then, if enough pressure builds, the truth emerges, and the fractures within the structures and systems we depend on are exposed.

Three weeks after three worshippers were murdered at the Islamic Center of San Diego, that is exactly what happened. Under sustained community pressure and the weight of a 75-page manifesto explicitly designed to trigger a race war, authorities scrambled to react. Finally, the FBI stepped in with a reclassification: domestic terrorism. Not just a hate crime.

But by the time the paperwork cleared, the attention economy had already exacted its tax. Naturally, the collective focus has migrated to the next crisis, the next viral conflict, or the next cycle of outrage. The state’s updated vocabulary arrives as a quiet postscript to a story the public has already stopped reading, leaving the bureaucratic machine to hollowly declare a victory of definition long after the world has moved on.

Then the news trucks packed up. The patrol cars disappeared. And the underlying pipelines that radicalize, arm, and mobilize violent actors remain entirely functional. Not metaphorically, but literally, utilizing the exact same fractured legal, security, and digital infrastructures—and the hosting providers and lobbying networks that insulate hate from accountability.

This structural delay creates a dangerous psychological trap. Because the institutional upgrade happens so late, the only words that truly stick in the public consciousness are the initial, sanitized headlines — circulated before the machinery of Big Tech and mainstream media has already pulled our attention elsewhere. This warps how we understand and process political violence in three specific ways:

• Cementing the Wrong Frame. The public internalizes the early, flawed narrative, “isolated incident”, as definitive truth. The structural reality “domestic terrorism,” “transnational accelerationist network”, is lost entirely.

• The Manufactured Attention Deficit. We are never allowed enough time to sit with a tragedy, sit with the grief, or critically analyze the failure. The attention economy demands constant novelty to maintain profitability.

• A Cycle of Strategic Amnesia. Media and tech infrastructures work in tandem to keep us perpetually moving forward. By starvation of time, they ensure structural failures never stay relevant long enough to generate sustained public interest or spark real systemic accountability.

  

Call It What It Is, And Then Go Further

Classifying this attack as domestic terrorism matters. Words carry weight. The designation formally elevates what happened to what it actually was: an ideological, coordinated assault on our collective security, incubated on domestic soil, inspired by an international accelerationist movement with a shared canon and a shared playbook.1

But symbolism does not stop bullets.

The FBI’s reclassification exposes a terrifying structural reality: our national security architecture and legal frameworks are fundamentally unequipped not just for a decentralized digital era, but for the era of ideological convergence.

Our counter-terrorism tools were built to detect rigid, uniform doctrines. They look for card-carrying members of specific, legacy hate groups. But modern online radicalization no longer requires ideological purity. Instead, the pipeline operates like an algorithmic “salad bar,” where broken individuals mix and match seemingly contradictory grievances.

In digital spaces, we now see a fluid convergence where militant accelerationism weaves seamlessly together with incel subcultures, radical anti-government conspiracism, hyper-nihilism, and eco-fascism. They are bound together not by a shared utopia, but by a shared desire for total systemic collapse.2

Our legal framework is structurally blind to this synthesis. It wastes critical time trying to pigeonhole an attacker into a singular, bureaucratic box—debating whether an event was a “hate crime” or “political terrorism”—while the pipeline itself has already moved past ideology entirely, unifying disparate factions under a singular, gamified playbook of mass violence.3

This profound mismatch between 20th-century static law and 21st-century fluid terror manifests in three devastating operational blind spots:

• The Teeth Gap: When an attacker is captured alive, federal prosecutors can leverage hate crime statutes to give the system legal teeth. But because there is no comprehensive domestic terrorism statute with preventative criminal charges for decentralized actors, the FBI’s reclassification carries zero immediate legal utility. It cannot preemptively punish, it cannot deter cell networks, and it cannot dynamically unseal preventative warrants against borderless entities.

• The Retroactive Trap: When perpetrators commit suicide at the scene—as Clark and Vazquez did, and as Christchurch's Tarrant explicitly instructed followers to do—the "domestic terrorism" label degrades entirely into an exercise in clerical data tracking. The real systemic failure is that our statutory frameworks are designed to react with labels only after the legal ledger is closed, rather than affording the state the proactive legal utility to dismantle the infrastructure before the first shot is fired.

• The Post-Mortem Reality: The entire national security apparatus functions as an autopsian machine, formally acknowledging a synthesis of threats only after the bodies are counted and the manifestos are downloaded, while thousands of other hyper-individualized actors currently sitting in online radicalization pipelines remain entirely untouched.

This is not a failure of law enforcement effort. It is a structural paralysis born from outdated legal architecture, and it was fully visible in San Diego sixteen months before the attack.

The Machinery Nobody Wants to Name. But We Will.

Here is what I have been arguing throughout my Safari Is Over series: the danger of performing autopsies on isolated events, rather than examining the systemic and structural conditions that produced them. We have become highly skilled at reacting to symptoms. We are far less practiced at dissecting causes.

San Diego is not a local tragedy. It is not an American anomaly. It is a data point in a global systems failure, and whether you are reading this from New York, Amsterdam, Nairobi, or Istanbul, you have a direct stake in what happens next.

To understand why San Diego happened, we must stop staring at the surface of the water. The pipeline is not built on extremist ideology alone. It is built on four foundational conditions — structural rot that runs far deeper than any manifesto:

I. Sociological Atomization: The systematic breakdown of local community infrastructure, civic spaces, and social cohesion in Western societies has created a massive demographic of lonely, untethered individuals experiencing acute existential drift. Legitimate personal isolation, economic anxiety, and alienation are not met with community care and human connection; instead, they are outsourced to profit-driven digital interfaces, and left to putrefy in online echo chambers that systematically converted personal grievance into collective, violent anti-system rage. Convincing vulnerable individuals that civilizational conflict is their only path to significance.

II. Asymmetric Jurisdictional Warfare & Legal and Governance Atrophy:

The state operates on an obsolete, 20th-century model of geographical borders and physical command chains (think structured cells and top-down organizations). Conversely, modern extremism operates through fluid, borderless hybrid decentralized extremist networks that defy fixed labels and render national legal architectures fundamentally toothless. International frameworks cannot stop cross-border ideological acceleration when the network has no fixed address and no central leadership to surveil.

III. The Financialization of Attention: Under digital capitalism, human attention is the ultimate commodity. Because outrage, fear, and polarization generate the highest engagement metrics, the economic foundations of tech and media are structurally aligned with the mechanics of radicalization. This is compounded by a fundamental fracture within journalism itself: hyper-accelerated timelines force breaking desks to treat attacks as context-free anomalies, while resource limitations strip investigative units of the capital and capacity required to map complex pipelines.

IV. The Complicity of the Self: We must ultimately confront our own role as media consumers, citizens, and communities. We actively feed the attention economy that makes outrage profitable. Sheltered by comforting narratives of exceptionalism, it is easy to point fingers at external villains or passively wait for “the authorities” to fix a broken world. By participating in fractured, hyper-individualistic cultures, we starve the collective accountability and social tissue required to stop the bleeding before it begins.

The New Holy Trinity: The Infrastructure of Radicalization

When these four root conditions converge, they give birth to three operational engines: the obvious threats we point fingers at. They are not the roots. They are the highly functional superstructure built directly on top of the structural decay.

I. The Revenue Locomotive (The Optimization Engine):

Operating within a governance vacuum, Big Tech and Corporate Media serve as the front-end funnel. Mainstream algorithms optimize recommendation loops to push isolated people toward extremism, while corporate parents spend millions lobbying to kill transparency bills that would force them to reveal how those loops work. Simultaneously, mainstream outlets package mass casualties into sensationalized, polarizing content because fear drives ad revenue, and fear provides the exact global megaphone the attackers designed their massacres to achieve.

II. The Infrastructure of Permission (The Technical Sub-Layer)

When mainstream platforms issue bans, extremism simply migrates fluidly into a decentralized, unmoderated tech layer that exploits the governance void. It utilizes decentralized, federated networks like Matrix/Element and private Mastodon instances, metadata-free encrypted messaging apps like Session and private Signal forks, anonymous imageboards like 4chan, 8kun, and EndChan, and offshore bulletproof hosting providers. This plumbing ensures their digital infrastructure remains immune to state censorship or legal subpoenas, and keeps the recruitment archive accessible to the next shooter in a bedroom somewhere.

III. The Ideal Archetype (The Cultural Gamification Network)

Decentralized cells and imageboards weaponize hyper-individualism by taking the isolated individuals processed by the Revenue Locomotive and offering them a tribal identity. They explicitly gamify mass murder, turning digital manifestos like The New Crusade into viral marketing collateral with leaderboards and digital trophies, ranking body counts like a video game leaderboard. This closes the loop: transforming the consumer of radical content into the next active producer of violence.

What’s Coming

This is part of Unembedded’s ongoing reporting and analysis on the systems, infrastructures, and power structures that produce political violence, and the people working to dismantle them.

San Diego is the entry point. The machinery it exposed is not local, and the reporting will not stay local.

In the coming weeks and months, we are going deeper into every layer of this infrastructure, through this and other past and current events. That means:

• The legal and security architecture: the counter-terrorism protocols, behavioral intervention frameworks, and intelligence-sharing systems that were all active in the Vazquez case, and the documented points at which each one failed. What the law can and cannot do. What it is designed to ignore. What a 20th-century security model looks like when it meets a 21st-century decentralized network.

• The tech and platform layer: Cloudflare’s four-year infrastructure relationship with WatchPeopleDie. Meta’s January 2025 content moderation rollback and what the data shows happened after it. The lobbying architecture that killed transparency legislation across ten countries. What the EU’s Digital Services Act is actually doing, and what it can’t touch.

• The transnational network: how Christchurch, Buffalo, Bratislava, Nashville, and San Diego are nodes on the same line. The shared canon, the shared playbook, the shared recruitment pipeline. Why this is not an American story, and what that means for practitioners, policymakers, and communities in Europe and beyond.

• The policy and accountability gap: the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act and why it has died in the Senate every session since 2017. What ERPO law can and cannot do about peer networks. What a network-aware intervention framework would actually require. Who is blocking it and what they are protecting.

• The cross-community dimension: the San Diego manifesto named Muslim, Jewish, Black, and LGBTQ communities as targets. The movement does not discriminate. Neither should the coalition fighting it. What a joint cross-community advocacy strategy looks like in practice, and who is already building it.

• The media and attention economy: how breaking news desks structurally produce the amnesia cycle this piece describes. What responsible coverage of ideological violence actually requires. The outlets and journalists doing it right, and what we can learn from them.

• The practitioner, activist, and engaged public tools. Public records request templates (CPRA for California, FOIA for federal). Digital safety guides for parents, educators, and community moderators. Model ERPO reform language for state-level advocates. Christchurch Call resources for civil society organizations engaging international frameworks. City council comment scripts. Shareholder action guides for institutional investors with human rights mandates. Scripts for talking to your kids, your neighbors, your elected officials, and your school board. Guides for recognizing radicalization early: in your home, your classroom, your community center, your mosque, your church, your synagogue. How to report, who to call, what actually happens when you do. And the full cross-community action playbooks/ tip sheets: concrete, specific, and written for everyone from the policy veteran to the parent who just found something disturbing on their teenager’s phone. Not awareness. Actionable.

We will not move on. That is the commitment.

The system flagged Caleb Vazquez sixteen months before the attack. It removed 26 guns from his home. It marked the file resolved. And it never saw Cain Clark coming, because the two of them built toward the same endpoint in digital spaces the architecture was never designed to watch.

That is where we go next.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

On Monday, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria took to a press conference podium intending to deliver standard, bureaucratic platitudes following a gruesome mass shooting. Hours earlier, two teenage gunmen entered the Islamic Center of San Diego, murdering three Muslim worshippers in cold blood before turning the weapons on themselves.

But the standard political script was abruptly shattered. A voice from the crowd shouted directly at the Mayor:

“This is a fucking direct result of your leadership! Our Muslim brothers and sisters have been talking to you... you emboldened Zionist propaganda, and you'll keep doing it!”

The footage is raw, uncomfortable, and rapidly going viral. It exposes a profound, simmering fury toward a political establishment that treats Islamophobic violence as an isolated anomaly while actively cultivating the soil where it grows.

The Architecture of Complicity

Local activists and community members are not just angry at a single press conference; they are indicting an entire career of selective empathy and institutional hostility. When we look past the Mayor’s public relations shield, a clear, three-part framework of systemic enabling emerges:

• Manufacturing Dehumanization: Mayor Gloria has consistently aligned himself with aggressive Zionist advocacy, uncritically repeating foreign policy narratives that paint Arab and Palestinian populations as inherently suspect. This rhetoric domesticates violence, signaling to extremist actors that these communities do not deserve protection.

• Weaponizing Identity to Silence Dissent: In a cynical display of identity politics, Gloria previously boycotted a major local Pride event because the headlining artist, Kehlani, expressed solidarity with Palestine. By weaponizing his platform to penalize basic human empathy, he signaled that solidarity with Muslim and Arab lives is a fireable public offense.

• Institutionalizing Xenophobia: Beyond the rhetoric lies policy. Under Gloria’s administration, local municipal systems have quietly cooperated with federal immigration crackdowns and ICE raids. This has effectively normalized the idea that the immigrant "other" is a structural threat to public safety.

The "Hate Crime" Shield: A Direct Institutional Deception

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The most dangerous weapon in the municipal toolkit is the deliberate manipulation of legal definitions. The distinction comes down to specific U.S. federal laws, which treat international terrorism differently from domestic terrorism, frequently creating a structural double standard in how the word "terrorism" is legally applied.

We are seeing this exact bureaucratic evasion play out right now in San Diego:

• The Administrative Classification: San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl stated that the mass shooting is being treated strictly as a hate crime. This classification was maintained even after federal and local investigators uncovered anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist writings in the vehicle, alongside a 75-page manifesto left behind by the two deceased teenage shooters, Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez.

The manifesto was titled “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant” and made reference to Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people and injured 89 more in an attack on a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, according to the sources. The FBI confirmed Tuesday that it is examining a manifesto, but did not verify the one circulating online that purports to be the attackers’ writings.

• The Prohibited Prosecution: Because both perpetrators died of self-inflicted wounds immediately following the attack, no formal criminal charges, such as state hate crime enhancements or federal domestic terrorism-related charges, will ever be prosecuted in an open court of law. The legal book has been effectively closed.

• The Expert Counter-Narrative: While local police and the FBI handle the formal criminal probe under restrictive hate crime frameworks, independent experts refuse to play along. Researchers from organizations like George Washington University’s Program on Extremism have publicly characterized the event as a clear instance of "do-it-yourself domestic terrorism," citing the suspects' deep online radicalization and adherence to neo-Nazi, far-right accelerationist ideologies. Simultaneously, civil rights and advocacy groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have fiercely condemned the mass shooting as a textbook terrorist attack against the Muslim community.

This is why the linguistic shift matters: a hate crime designation frames mass violence as the tragic, isolated work of pathologically bigoted lone wolves.

Conversely, labeling an attack terrorism forces the state to admit that an organized, ideological insurgency is operating successfully under its watch. It would require local law enforcement and the Mayor’s office to launch aggressive, proactive counterterrorism operations against domestic, right-wing networks, the very networks fueled by mainstream political scapegoating.

By downgrading a targeted terrorist onslaught to a localized hate crime, local officials decouple the violence from the hostile political climate they helped create. They treat the symptom while actively protecting the disease.

These recent gruesome murders are not an aberration. They are the predictable, scalable consequence of a systemically fostered environment.

But understanding the machinery of this institutional deception is only the first step. Outrage without a tactical target is exactly what complicit officials rely on—they expect our fury to fade by the next news cycle.

To shatter this cycle, we must convert our systemic critique into direct, localized pressure. If the state refuses to classify this violence accurately, the community must force accountability through every legislative, legal, and financial mechanism available.

Dismantling the Machinery: How to Force Accountability

Acknowledge the grief, but channel the rage into concrete structural leverage. To force real accountability from Mayor Gloria and compromised municipal institutions, the public must execute targeted civic disruptions:

1. Weaponize the City Council Record: Do not just protest outside. Under San Diego municipal rules, community organizations can bundle individual speaking limits into a single, comprehensive 15-minute formal presentation. Use this mechanism to embed evidence of institutional complicity directly into the permanent city archive.

2. Audit the Police Data Pipeline: File targeted California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests demanding the internal communications between the Mayor’s office and local law enforcement regarding threat classifications. If local agencies are downplaying right-wing accelerationism to shield political donors, track the data and litigate.

3. Threaten Political Viability: Build independent, multi-faith voting coalitions that refuse to endorse, fund, or validate any local official who remains silent on domestic terror frameworks or participates in political boycotts of pro-Palestinian voices.

The political class expects our outrage to fade into the next news cycle. Do not let them change the subject. Share this post, drop your thoughts in the comments, and let's organize.

San Diego Grassroots Action Dashboard

• Organize Below the Radar: Follow and support the boots-on-the-ground work being led by faith and justice groups like Pillars of the Community San Diego (@potcsd) and American Muslims for Palestine.

• Demand Transparency: Use the San Diego City Council Comment Portal to demand a full audit of how the SDPD logs right-wing extremism versus civil rights violations.

The National Playbook: Moving Beyond San Diego

What happened in San Diego is happening in your city, too. Encroaching white supremacist violence is being minimized by a political class that refuses to name the threat. Here is how we fight back nationally:

• Flood Congress: Call your federal representatives and demand they co-sponsor the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act to force the FBI and DHS to legally treat white supremacy as a national security threat.

• Support the Frontlines: Amplify and fund national watchdogs like @CAIRNational and @AJP_Actionwho are legally challenging the institutional double standards that protect violent extremists.

• Primary Complicit Democrats: Work with groups like the Working Families Party to recruit, fund, and elect bold, grassroots leaders who refuse to sacrifice Muslim, Arab, and immigrant safety for establishment political donations.

(Author's Note: You can find the direct contact portal for your U.S. Representative at House.gov and your U.S. Senators at Senate.gov. It takes 90 seconds, and it breaks their office's status quo.)

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Copy-and-Paste Federal Action Script

Subject Line: Urgently Co-Sponsor the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act / Address Far-Right Extremism

Dear Senator / Representative [Insert Name Here],

My name is [Your Name], and I am a constituent writing from [Your City, State, Zip Code].

I am contacting your office to demand immediate legislative action following the horrific mass violence at the Islamic Center of San Diego. For decades, our federal national security apparatus has disproportionately targeted minority and activist communities while minimizing the organized, ideological threat of white supremacist and far-right accelerationist networks.

The habitual institutional practice of downgrading organized ideological slaughter to local "hate crimes" instead of classifying it as domestic terrorism shields violent political movements from necessary accountability.

As my representative, I urge you to immediately take the following federal actions:

1. Co-Sponsor and Pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act: Mandate that the FBI, DOJ, and DHS establish dedicated offices solely tasked with monitoring, analyzing, and prosecuting domestic terrorism networks.

2. Demand a Congressional Investigation into DHS Fusion Centers: Order a full budgetary and operational audit of state-and-local intelligence hubs to expose why federal security resources consistently ignore active right-wing extremist infrastructure.

3. Enforce the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act: Mandate strict data compliance for local police departments, ensuring they cannot legally misclassify or bury white supremacist violence under low-level reporting standards.

The political class can no longer hide behind generic press statements while ignoring the systemic infrastructure feeding domestic terror. Our communities deserve structural safety, not empty platitudes. I will be tracking your voting record on these specific measures closely.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information]

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Are you worried about what your children, students, friends, or community are being exposed to online right now?

The teenage gunmen who carried out Monday’s deadly attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego did not radicalize in a vacuum.

They were shaped by systems, and manufactured by design.

While communities mourn the lives of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad, commentators keep asking:

How does this keep happening?

The urgent question is:

How do we expect to protect young people from online radicalization while ignoring the algorithmic systems, dehumanizing political language, grievance economies, and engagement-driven infrastructures that normalize extremism in the first place?

The infrastructure of modern violence has fundamentally changed.

What once lived in fragmented corners of the internet is now embedded into everyday digital life, reaching children earlier, faster, and more intimately than ever before.

It connects seemingly disparate horrors: ISIS propaganda networks, the Christchurch mosque livestream, antisemitic synagogue attacks, and the rising global surge of femicide and targeted misogyny.

For years, Western institutions treated these threats as distant, fringe, or external. Domestic extremism was minimized, selectively labeled, or politically compartmentalized while the underlying systems continued expanding in plain sight.

Today, state actors, influencers, extremist networks, and platform economies increasingly exploit the same vulnerabilities: fear, isolation, humiliation, identity crises, discrimination, and social alienation.

The pipeline is digital, and its consequences are physical.

So I created this tip sheet not as a panic document, but as a practical starting point for parents, educators, journalists, organizers, and communities trying to understand what is actually happening around them, and what warning signs we can no longer afford to ignore.

This is only the beginning.

In the coming weeks, Unembedded will continue publishing:

• practical prevention guidance

• platform accountability analysis

• newsroom reporting frameworks

• policy pressure points

• school and community intervention strategies

• investigations into the systems shaping modern online radicalization

Prevention starts long before violence. It starts with understanding the systems shaping attention, identity, belonging, and belief.

Subscribe to Unembedded, and restock and share this with your networks.

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Please note: the guidance and frameworks shared through Unembedded will continue evolving as technologies, platforms, policies, and online behaviors rapidly change. Stay subscribed for updated analysis, corrections, resources, and future action frameworks.

— Raja Althaibani, Editor, Unembedded

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

This essay is part II of The Safari Is Over, a series that uses the manosphere as a lens to examine the media systems, economic conditions, and institutional failures that produced it, the broader harms those failures generate well beyond this one ecosystem, and what practitioners, journalists, and anyone paying attention can actually do about it. The manosphere is the entry point. It is not the destination. Read Part I here. Follow and subscribe on Substack.

Louis Theroux went inside the manosphere the way institutions always go inside things they don’t understand: with a camera, a broadcast license, and the quiet confidence that naming something is the same as knowing it. It wasn’t. What Inside the Manosphere produced was ninety minutes of compelling television that reproduced the exact logic it arrived to examine, and in doing so, caught something it didn’t mean to: a more structurally honest document hiding inside the spectacle, about media, power, and the system most institutions covering this space have a considered interest in never quite naming. A 24-year-old fitness influencer named it anyway, with a box of donuts.

The Intergenerational Reckoning

In the film’s more subdued scenes, the alpha facade evaporates. We see Harrison Sullivan, née HS TikkyTokky, not as a digital titan but as a 24-year-old tentatively assessing his safety with an outsider. He is visibly disarmed by Theroux: a man who carries quiet authority without a supercar or a livestream, whose power rests on something Sullivan’s world doesn’t trade in: accumulated institutional credibility.

To Sullivan, Theroux is something between a ghost and an indictment. Not a moral superior, but a living artifact of a world that no longer exists. He represents the stable father figures, the stable career ladders, the functional social contracts, the era in which an expensive degree, a reputable institution, and thirty years of accumulated experience built something durable, something that compounded, that you could pass on. The era of greater opportunity that Sullivan’s generation was told to expect and has never been offered. That world produced the likes of Theroux. And the people who built it are now the ones holding the microphone, asking Sullivan to explain himself.

What Sullivan’s generation inherited was not the system. It was the wreckage of the system, and the insistence, from the people who benefited from it, that the wreckage is their fault— and everyone else’s fault but them: immigrants, queers, women, black people, Latinos, the ‘uncivilized’Middle East, Jews, Muslims.

The data behind this is not abstract. Federal Reserve research shows Baby Boomers owned over 20 percent of the nation’s wealth by the time their median age reached 35; Millennials, at the same point, owned less than 5 percent. A housing market turned shelter into a financialized asset class. Tuition debt for credentials that no longer open the doors they were sold to open. A mental health epidemic unfolding alongside the productivity gospel. And real wages stagnated while the institutions best positioned to respond—legacy media, political parties, universities, humanitarian complex—each became more invested in their own survival than in the constituencies they were built to serve. The explanatory frameworks for this collapse are everywhere now; their proliferation is itself evidence that when institutions stop providing coherent accounts of the conditions they produced, the explanation market opens up, and it fills with whatever arrives first.

Into that vacuum, two responses have emerged. The manosphere correctly identifies the betrayal and routes it into misogyny, racial resentment, and the politics of domination. A different generation of journalists, organizers, and independent media makers is also refusing the old framework, but fighting to build something more honest in its place.

What unites both, the grifters and the truth-tellers, is that they are holding up a mirror. The manosphere’s reflection is distorted, engineered to flatter the grievance and monetize the rage. But the first thing it shows you, before the distortion sets in, is real: the establishment’s hypocrisy, its moral self-congratulation, its total inability to see what is directly in front of it or hear what is being said to its face.

That is what this essay examines. Theroux is not the villain of this story. He is its most useful illustration, a good-faith representative of an institutional class that arrived at this encounter with all the right credentials and the wrong frame, and left having been shown, clearly and without apology, what the world looks like from the other side of the glass.

The donut shop is where that showing begins.

The Donut Shop: Mercenary Transparency vs. the Theater of Virtue

In one of the documentary’s pivotal scenes, Theroux attempts to pin Sullivan on his central contradiction. Sullivan built his platform on a specific promise to young men: that OnlyFans degrades the women who use it and the men who consume it, that real alpha discipline means refusing the easy hit, that their weakness is a choice. He built his following on that moral framework and simultaneously ran an OnlyFans referral operation, profiting directly from every subscriber he sent there. The men who trusted his guidance were, in effect, paying him twice: once for the identity and once for the behavior he told them proved they lacked it.

The Bonnie Blue scene makes this visible in real time. Sullivan invites adult content creator Bonnie Blue onto his livestream, calls her “disgusting” and “absolutely repulsive” on camera, and then admits to Theroux, without embarrassment, that he invited her specifically to exploit her notoriety for his own viewership numbers. She knew it. She came anyway. Both extracted what they needed and called it content. The audience got the spectacle. Sullivan got the clicks. And the young men watching got another lesson in which women are repulsive, from the man simultaneously monetizing their attention toward her. The donut shop has more than one counter.

@thesunThis is the shocking moment HStikkytokky and Bonnie Blue clash on Louis Theroux’s new Netflix doc as he calls her ‘repulsive.' Read the full story above. #bonnieblue #HStikkytokky #louistheroux

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What Theroux then attempts is a precise unfolding of exactly this: to make Sullivan account for what he has built on, telling the young men who follow him that certain things are beneath them while quietly profiting from every one of them who does what he condemns. Sullivan isn’t merely a hypocrite. He is selling his audience a moral framework he doesn’t believe in, to an audience that trusts him, while extracting money from the behavior he’s told them makes them weak.

Theroux: “It’s like saying... ‘Here’s a box of donuts that I’m holding up to your face. If you eat that, you’re a loser, but I’m gonna work out.’ I’m getting a very mixed message.”

Sullivan: “You do what you choose. If you wanna go and eat the donuts, eat the donuts, but I own the donut shop. So whether you come in the gym and pay for my PT or eat the donuts, I make dough either way.”

Sullivan’s response doesn’t answer the question. It dismantles the frame the question assumed.

This is the death of the gotcha interview, and it is worth understanding precisely why. For decades, investigative journalism has relied on the moral contradiction as its primary lever: pin the subject down, expose the hypocrisy, force the reckoning. Theroux deploys that lever here with considerable skill. It doesn’t work, not because Sullivan is more clever, but because the lever depends on a shared assumption that Sullivan’s world has already discarded: that shame functions as a regulatory mechanism. In a hyper-financialized attention economy, moral shame has been replaced by the currency of reach and revenue. Sullivan doesn’t deny the contradiction. He reframes it as a business model. And to his audience, that reframing reads not as deflection but as honesty.

Sullivan’s logic is internally consistent: in a fully commodified system, the moral weight of a transaction shifts from seller to buyer the moment the buyer makes an informed choice. He is not pretending to be a good person. He is refusing to perform the pretense. And paradoxically, that refusal makes him appear, to the audience watching, more trustworthy than the institutional gatekeeper trying to hold him to account.

Sullivan is an outlier in his own ecosystem, not a representative of it— a distinction the documentary consistently fails to make.

What Sullivan doesn’t realize, and what the documentary doesn’t examine, is that his donut shop logic accidentally raises a question Theroux never quite asks. If the consumer knows the product is harmful and buys it anyway, who holds the moral weight? Sullivan isn’t making a principled argument about informed consent. He’s practicing a distorted, transactional version of it—one in which disclosure substitutes for responsibility, and naming the harm is treated as the same thing as absolution from it.

But the deflection lands on something real. His ethics are transparent in the narrowest possible sense: he hides nothing about what he is selling or why. And that accidental, twisted clarity exposes something the documentary never turns to face: that the institutions now asking him to defend himself operate on the same extraction logic, just with cleaner branding. They routinely mask predatory practice behind a veneer of advocacy, moral authority, or public service. The difference is they never name it. Sullivan, however grotesquely, did.

But look at the room. Theroux is not just a journalist asking a question. He is a representative of a media system—BBC-trained, Netflix-distributed—that also needed this encounter to happen. The documentary exists because Sullivan’s world generates compelling, profitable, algorithmic content. Netflix benefits from the access. Sullivan benefits from the legitimacy and reach that a Theroux documentary confers. Both are in the donut shop. The critical difference is that Sullivan named it.

This is what researchers who study media and power call media-as-node: the recognition that journalism and media production don’t sit outside the systems they cover, observing from neutral ground. They are participants in the same information economy, shaped by the same structural incentives—access, visibility, revenue—that shape their subjects. The newsroom is not the referee. It is another player. And the moment it covers an influencer, a movement, or an ecosystem for outrage clicks or high viewership, it stops challenging that ecosystem and starts fueling the economic engine that sustains it.

This isn’t a critique of Theroux as an individual. He is simply more visible than most. The logic that produced his encounter with Sullivan is the same logic that produced Sullivan in the first place. Recognizing this doesn’t make Sullivan’s behavior more acceptable. It makes the critique more honest and harder to dodge.

Sullivan already understands this.

“If I’d just done good things, I would never have really blown up in the first place,” he tells Theroux.

He is describing, with unusual precision, the structure of the attention economy he inhabits. Not justifying it, but mapping it.

“And I’m not living for other people. I’m living for myself,” he says. “My kids are going to be very, very happy, very fulfilled.”

Theroux names what he’s watching: “You sound a bit like Bonnie Blue.” He means it as an indictment. Sullivan hears it as a category error. The documentary never quite resolves why both of them are right.

The Reciprocal Radicalization Cycle

What Sullivan represents, and what the documentary fails to systematically address, is not a personal moral failure but the output of a specific structural mechanism.

Call it the Reciprocal Radicalization Cycle: a closed loop in which economic precarity and social isolation produce grievance, grievance gets packaged as identity, identity gets monetized through escalating provocation, and the resulting outrage cycles back through media coverage that amplifies exactly what it claims to be investigating. The cycle is self-reinforcing: each amplification creates conditions for the next escalation; each escalation creates conditions for the next amplification.

The evidence for its effects is specific. UK research published by Ofcom shows that manosphere content now forms part of the regular online environment many young users encounter directly — not sought-out extremism but ambient noise, algorithm-served and normalized. Counter-terrorism data from the same period shows 19 percent of those arrested for terrorism-related offenses in the UK in 2023 were aged 17 and under.

These numbers don’t establish a direct pipeline from any specific content to any specific act. What they describe is an ecology, a set of conditions in which radicalization becomes more available, more legible, and more appealing to people who have already been stripped of other sources of identity, purpose, and belonging.

No single actor in this ecology bears the crime alone. Accountability is distributed. The platforms that amplify, the media that spectacularizes, the institutions that fail to respond, the audiences that click, all participate. Whitney Phillips’ landmark 2018 Data & Society report, The Oxygen of Amplification, documented this precisely: even responsible, critical reporting on extremists can increase their reach, drive recruitment, and inspire imitators. The act of coverage is not neutral. Attention is a resource, and the cycle has learned to harvest it from every direction, including from the journalism meant to interrupt it.

The research on radicalization is consistent across cases: the common thread is not coherent ideology but a recognizable cluster of conditions: narcissistic grievance, social isolation, a prior history of personal failure, personal humiliation, and an information environment that handed each a ready-made identity, enemy, and path to significance. The ideology was the costume. The attention economy was the fuel.

This pattern extends to the manosphere’s own hierarchy. It is not coincidental that its most prominent figures share a recognizable profile: men whose personal circumstances—failed relationships, stalled ambitions, real or perceived humiliations—found rescue in a system that reframed failure as persecution and persecution as identity. The manosphere didn’t radicalize them by exposing them to correct information about a hostile world. It gave lonely, volatile individuals a hero narrative and a cast of villains. The media, by repeatedly centering those figures as fascinating, dangerous, and worthy of prime-time investigation, has done its own work in that same direction.

Here is where the media-as-node argument becomes most consequential: the reciprocal radicalization cycle doesn’t run only through platforms and influencers. It also runs through the coverage. Every time a documentary, a news segment, or a morning show treats the manosphere as a spectacle of outrageous personalities rather than a networked ecosystem with a structural function, it performs exactly the same displacement: making the behavior visible and the machinery invisible, generating attention without generating understanding, amplifying without explaining. Feeding the cycle it claims to be exposing.

The manosphere didn’t create those conditions; it is harvesting them. And the media, in its current form, is assisting the harvest.

The manosphere is not the only mirror the system holds up. Its femisphere counterpart runs the same extraction in reverse: monetizing female grievance through the same algorithmic infrastructure, routing the same legitimate structural conditions toward the same illegitimate conclusions. That ecosystem will get its own full examination in a separate installment. What both prove together is the central argument of this essay: this is not a story about bad men or bad women or bad influencers. It is a story about a system that converts structural failure into identity, identity into provocation, and provocation into revenue; and that runs this cycle regardless of which gender is holding the microphone, which platform is hosting it, or which institution claims to be covering it from neutral ground.

The establishment’s response has been consistent and consistently inadequate: label the creators grifters, platform them for engagement, then perform dismay at the reach. What it has not done is examine its own role in producing the conditions that made both ecosystems legible, or acknowledge that the same institutional failures Sullivan named in the donut shop are the substrate both sides are feeding on. That absence of self-examination is not an oversight. It is the same selective accountability. The establishment is also in the shop. It has simply never had to say so out loud.

Next in the series:

Inside the Manosphere III: Affective Combat and the Paper Tiger—on Piers Morgan’s walk off, what it revealed about the structural fragility of legacy media power, the establishment, and how all roads lead back to Gaza. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

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Key Concepts — Part II

Media-as-node: Journalism and media production don’t stand outside the systems they cover. They are participants in the same information economy, shaped by the same structural incentives—access, visibility, revenue—that shape their subjects. The newsroom is not the referee. It is another player. And its silence is not neutrality. It is a decision about whose reality gets to be real.

Reciprocal Radicalization Cycle: A closed loop in which economic precarity produces grievance, grievance is monetized through escalating provocation, and media coverage amplifies what it claims to investigate, creating conditions for the next cycle. Accountability in this cycle is distributed across platforms, institutions, audiences, and the journalism meant to interrupt it. No single actor bears the crime alone. All participate.

Mercenary Transparency vs. Theater of Virtue: Sullivan names his mercenary motive plainly. The institutions surrounding him— the media, NGOs, the counter-terrorism industrial complex, the humanitarian sector— perform virtue while extracting the same value through cleaner branding. The question is not which is worse. It is why one gets a Netflix budget and the other gets a subpoena.

The Safari Is Over is a diagnostic series — an autopsy of the media systems, economic conditions, and institutional failures that produce and sustain exploitative ecosystems like the manosphere, and the broader harms those failures generate well beyond it. It names what is broken, how it got that way, and who pays the invoice.

Killing Spectacle, published in The Field Dispatch, is the companion: a practitioner’s guide to covering online harm and extremism without reproducing its logic. Where The Safari Is Over diagnoses, Killing Spectacle prescribes fifteen shifts across framing, verification, sourcing, and sustained practice for journalists, editors, researchers, and anyone trying to report the system rather than the spectacle.

Both live under Unembedded, structural and media analysis, human rights documentation, and practitioner intelligence for people working the documentation-to-narrative-to-accountability pipeline.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

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Part 1 covered the first three shifts media practitioners should make before reporting— pitch the system, report the consequence, center the burden-bearers. Here are two more bonus shifts to carry with you. Because I care, and because I want us to win.

From Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism, a guide for journalists, editors, producers, researchers, and media practitioners. Published here in parts. Each installment stands alone. The full picture builds across the series.

Start here: Part 1: Frame the Story Right .

Here are two more shifts to make in our daily practice to help us kill the ‘spectacle’ in ‘spectacle journalism’.

My first piece published here covered first three mindset and technical shifts, before reporting: pitch the system not the spectacle, report consequence not conflict, center the burden-bearers not the perpetrators. Those shifts are about what story you’re telling and whose experience is at the center of it.

These two are about something that happens before any of that, reading the information environment you’re working inside before you let it assign the story for you.

On beats covering online harm, extremism, and AI abuse, the platform is not a neutral surface. It is an active editorial force. It decides what looks significant. It manufactures the appearance of consensus. It makes fringe content look mainstream and widespread harm look marginal. Journalists who don’t account for that are not reporting reality. They are reporting the platform’s version of reality, which is designed, in specific and documented ways, to serve interests other than public understanding.

These two shifts are about closing that gap before the first word is written, or first raw video is collected, edited, or clipped.

Shift 4: Virality is evidence of distribution, not importance

Unlearn: Treat trending content as proof that something matters.

Relearn: Virality tells you something was distributed at scale. It tells you almost nothing about whether it reflects reality.

One of the most corrosive habits in covering online harm and extremism is treating visibility as proof. A piece of content goes viral. It appears in your feed, your editor’s feed, your source’s feed. It feels significant because it is everywhere.

But everywhere on a platform is an editorial decision made by an algorithm, not a measure of cultural reality, social consensus, or genuine threat. Platforms are built to surface conflict and blur the line between significance and visibility. Journalism walks straight into that trap when it treats the trending tab as an assignment editor.

Urgency and importance are not the same thing. A piece of content can reach ten million people and reflect almost nothing about how those people actually think, behave, or live. A pattern that affects millions can be entirely invisible on a platform because it doesn’t produce the engagement mechanics that make content travel.

The shift is learning to ask:

is this visible because it is significant, or does it seem significant because it is visible?

What this looks like in practice

The 2024 tradwife surge looked, from inside the feed, like a mass cultural shift: a generation of women returning to domestic roles. Mainstream coverage treated it that way. Research from Monash University and the International Journal of Communication found no evidence of that in behavioral data. What the data showed was that recommendation algorithms were artificially funneling users toward increasingly extreme gender content. The trend didn’t reflect what women wanted. It reflected what the platform rewarded and amplified. Reporting it as a cultural shift normalized extremist content through perceived popularity, exactly the outcome the amplification was designed to produce.

The same failure appears constantly on extremism beats. Coordinated seeding makes fringe content look mainstream. Manufactured outrage cycles make marginal figures look culturally significant. The platform’s engagement mechanics are not neutral. They are specifically designed to surface the most inflammatory version of any story. Treating that surface as reality is a reporting failure, not just an editorial one.

Editorial test:

If this were not trending, would you still assign it?

If the answer is no, you are covering distribution, not reality.

If this incident had never been filmed, clipped, or algorithmically amplified, would it still matter?

If the answer is yes, that is where the story begins.

Field note on extremism and online harm beats specifically:

On these beats the virality problem is often deliberate, not incidental. Bad actors engineer viral moments specifically to manufacture the appearance of consensus, to make a fringe position look mainstream, a marginal figure look culturally dominant, an isolated incident look like a pattern. The tradwife surge was organic platform mechanics producing a distorted picture. Coordinated extremist content seeding is the same distortion produced intentionally.

The verification question is the same in both cases:

is this visible because it is significant, or significant because it is visible?

Before escalating any trending story on these beats, ask whether the spike is organic or cluster-driven. The answer changes what you’re actually covering.

Toolkit 4: Auditing virality before you escalate

Before escalating any trending story, run this test:

Does this affect policy, safety, public resources, or a meaningful number of people beyond the feed?

If not, you are covering distribution.

For checking whether a spike is organic or coordinated: Junkipedia tracks coordinated inauthentic behavior and platform manipulation; the Stanford Internet Observatory publishes platform-specific research on amplification mechanics; CrowdTangle (now Meta Content Library) and Brandwatch track cross-platform spread patterns.

For situating platform trends in behavioral reality: look for data that exists outside the platform such as surveys, behavioral research, policy data, academic studies that either corroborates or contradicts what the platform surface suggests. Monash University’s platform research and the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report are both useful starting points for cross-referencing platform visibility against real-world data. Also check out Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit.

Newsworthiness test before escalating any trend:

does this have policy effects, safety implications, measurable behavioral uptake, or institutional consequences outside the platform?

If it scores zero on all four, it is a distribution story, not a significance story.

See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 5: Situate the incident in the pattern

Unlearn: Let one vivid case carry the argument about scale.

Relearn: Every incident needs a baseline, a trend line, and proportionality ( in both directions).

One vivid case can distort an entire public conversation. This happens constantly in coverage of online harm, extremism, and AI abuse: a single incident is treated as a trend, a trend is treated as a crisis, a crisis is reported without baseline data. Audiences end up with inflated fear, or false reassurance, and no way to judge what is actually escalating versus what is simply newly visible.

The proportionality failure runs in both directions, and both directions cause harm.

Inflating rare incidents produces moral panic, bad policy, and the kind of fear that bad actors deliberately manufacture. Minimizing widespread patterns produces public blindness to structural harm that is hiding in plain sight. Both failures serve bad actors: the first by manufacturing urgency around marginal threats, the second by providing cover for systemic ones.

Reporting the pattern means reporting both directions with equal rigor. How common is this, really? Is it rising, falling, or newly visible? Is this incident exceptional or representative? What would a reader need to know to make an accurate judgment about the scale and nature of the harm?

What this looks like in practice

Coverage of incel-linked violence regularly treats isolated attacks as evidence of a mass movement, inflating a rare incident into a pattern that the data doesn’t support. Coverage of Andrew Tate’s reach did the inverse: the Hope Not Hate finding that 8 in 10 boys aged 16 to 17 had seen his material, and the YouGov finding that 1 in 6 boys aged 6 to 15 held a positive view of him, were treated as fringe statistics in coverage that hadn’t done the work of situating the numbers. That is not a fringe statistic. Reporting it as one was a failure of proportionality in the opposite direction, minimizing a documented, widespread pattern because the number was uncomfortable to report at its actual scale.

The Marshall Project’s context-first reporting on crime data is the model for how to do this right: every incident is situated in the baseline, every trend is measured against historical data, and the story names clearly what the data shows and what it doesn’t. One dramatic incident never distorts the national picture because the national picture is always present in the reporting.

Editorial test:

Are you showing readers where this event sits in the real pattern — or are you allowing vividness to substitute for scale? Can you state, specifically: is this incident typical, exceptional, rising, falling, or simply newly visible?

If you can’t answer that question before you file, the context is missing.

Field note on these beats specifically:

The proportionality question is weaponized on both sides of these beats. Extremist actors inflate their own significance to appear more powerful and culturally dominant than they are. Treat their visibility claims with the same skepticism you’d apply to any source with an incentive to exaggerate. Platform harm is simultaneously minimized by the institutions that produce it. Treat their framing of harm as marginal or exceptional with the same skepticism. Your job is to find the actual baseline, which usually requires going outside the platform, outside the institution, and outside the most visible sources on both sides.

Use the context box. Add this to every spike story and every incident report on these beats:

• Baseline: what is the normal rate or scale of this type of incident or behavior?

• Trend line: is this rising, falling, stable, or newly visible?

• Rarity: is this exceptional or representative?

• Responsible inference: what can we actually conclude from this data, and what would we need to establish what we can’t yet conclude?

That box, applied consistently, prevents a single dramatic case from doing the work that evidence should do.

Toolkit 5: Context tools for situating incidents in pattern

For baseline and trend line data on online harm and extremism: the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) publishes research specifically designed to provide contextual data for journalists; the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) tracks platform harm at scale; Hope Not Hate’s annual State of Hate report provides UK and European baseline data on extremism reach and penetration.

For AI harm and platform data: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute all publish research that provides the baseline data most platform coverage lacks. Use them before you file, not after.

For proportionality in both directions: the Context Box above. Apply it to every spike story. If you can’t fill in all four fields, you don’t have enough information to report the incident as evidence of a pattern.

Pro tip: add the context box to every spike story: baseline, trend line, rarity, and what we can responsibly infer. It takes ten minutes and prevents the single most common framing failure on these beats.

See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

What these two shifts have in common, and how they complete Phase 1 (shifts and tips before reporting)

Both shifts are about the same underlying discipline: not letting the platform assign your story.

Shift 4 asks whether what is visible is actually significant. Shift 5 asks whether what is significant is being accurately sized. Together they close the two most common framing failures on these beats: treating virality as cultural evidence, and treating a single incident as proof of a pattern.

Combined with the first three shifts, Phase 1 is now complete. You know what story you’re telling (the system, not the spectacle), whose experience is at the center (the burden-bearers, not the perpetrators), what you’re following (consequence, not conflict), whether the platform signal is real (Shift 4), and whether the scale is accurate (Shift 5).

Phase 2 begins where Phase 1 ends. Once you know what you’re covering, how you gather and weigh evidence determines everything.

Please share your favorite tips and any additional shifts you think we should be making as media and human rights practitioners reporting on online harm. The shifts, tips and toolkits in this series are non-exhaustive, and are serve as a launching pad for this community, which includes YOU, to extract from as well as contribute to.

Because we care. And because we want to win. Collectively.

The Field

The practices above are easier to sustain inside a community of people working on the same problems than alone. That’s what The Field is: a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technologists working at this intersection, built on the principle that the people with the most situational knowledge are often those with the least institutional power, and that better practice requires closing that gap deliberately. If this is your beat, wherever you are, it’s yours to join.

Join The Field: Fill out the intake form or reach out to me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

The Frontier

Phase 1’s specific frontier question is the platform transparency problem: you can’t accurately situate incidents in pattern or audit virality if the platforms controlling the data don’t share it. Shifts 4 and 5 both require external data sources precisely because platform data is inaccessible, unreliable, or strategically curated. The EU Digital Services Act and US platform accountability efforts are the most significant structural responses to this problem, and both are currently contested, partially implemented, and under pressure. Naming that gap is part of what this guide does. Closing it requires more than better journalism. It requires platform accountability infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist at the scale these beats require.

Up next — Killing Spectacle, Part 2: Rigor Without Cruelty

Phase 1 is complete. Phase 2 is where the frame you built either holds or falls apart.

How to verify claims in spaces designed to mislead — including how to slow down when emotion spikes and bad actors are deliberately manufacturing urgency. How to build an evidence hierarchy rather than a transcript of competing claims. And how to use AI to see what only becomes visible at scale, rather than to produce faster noise.

Part 2 is where the craft gets specific. The frame is only as good as what you can prove.

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If this is your beat — or someone you edit, teach, or commission —send it directly and invite them to join The Field. The journalists and media practitioners who need this most are rarely the ones looking for it.

These aren’t universal rules. They’re practices drawn from years in this space. What works in a long-form investigation won’t always survive a breaking news brief. Context matters. This guide is a conversation, leave a comment or reach me directly with what’s missing and what works. What’s useful goes into the guide, with credit.

About the author. Raja Althaibani is an advisor, strategist, and trainer working at the intersection of human rights, media systems, digital evidence, and emerging technology. With over 15 years of experience across the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States, she has worked with journalists, civil society organizations, and international institutions to document harm, build accountability processes, and adapt human rights practice to shifting technological and political realities. She previously worked at WITNESS, the human rights organization specializing in video and digital documentation. She is the founder of Arab Hyphenated.

She writes Unembedded, which includes the ongoing series The Safari Is Over, and founded The Field, a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, and technical practitioners working on these beats.

inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Join The Field

killing spectacle | media guide | virality | platform accountability | online harm | extremism | framing | Raja Althaibani

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

The problems at the intersection of media, online harm, technology, and accountability don't respect disciplinary boundaries. Neither should the people working on them.

A journalist investigating an extremist network needs to understand platform infrastructure. A human rights lawyer building a case around digital evidence needs to understand how that evidence was collected and verified. A technologist building tools for open-source investigation needs to understand what practitioners in conflict zones can actually access and use. A researcher documenting online abuse needs to understand how newsrooms make editorial decisions, and what gets lost in translation between the field and the published piece. And a community documentarian on the ground needs to understand how her work will travel once it leaves her hands: who will interpret it, in what context, and toward what end.

These people rarely work together in any sustained way. The communities of practice1 that exist are largely siloed: by discipline, by geography and language, by institution, and by the structural imbalances that have long shaped who gets to lead, contribute, and be heard in this space.

The Field exists to change that.

What The Field is

The Field is a cross-sector community of practice (CoP)2, global from the start, for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technical practitioners working at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability.

It was founded on a simple argument: that the existing community of practice in this space is fractured, skewed toward Global North institutions, and structurally extractive toward the practitioners with the most situational knowledge and the least institutional power. That better outcomes— better journalism, stronger accountability, more effective tools, more durable practice require deliberate, unblocked collaboration across the full spectrum of the field.3

This is not a network. It’s a working community co-created, contribution-led, and designed to be less monopolized, more inclusive, and genuinely global.

What The Field does

The Field brings together practitioners to:

• Build shared knowledge across disciplines, geographies, and languages so that the journalist, the lawyer, the researcher, and the technologist are working from the same foundation rather than talking past each other.

• Develop practical frameworks and field guidance including methodologies, tools, and resources that are actually usable by the full range of people doing this work, not just those with institutional backing and Global North infrastructure.

• Strengthen the work that holds systems accountable by centering practitioners with situational knowledge, reducing extractive dynamics, and creating conditions for collaboration that is fair, equitable, and genuinely useful.

• Build a community of practice that lasts by connecting practitioners across sectors and geographies who are doing this work, sharing what they know, and building something more durable than any single investigation, report, or news cycle.

Who it’s for

If you work in any of the following, wherever you are in the world, The Field is for you:

Journalism and editorial practice · Open-source investigation and digital evidence · Human rights documentation and advocacy · International law and accountability · Disinformation and information disorder research · Platform policy and tech accountability · AI, emerging technology, and public interest practice · Media training and capacity building

This includes, and deliberately centers, practitioners from the so-called Global South (Global Majority), diaspora communities, and those working in and on conflict-affected and underrepresented contexts. The people closest to the harm are the ones this field most needs to hear from.

You don’t need an institutional affiliation. You don’t need to be based in a Global North city. You need to be doing the work, or building toward it.

Further Reading

The Field builds on arguments first made here: The Case To (Re)new Community of Practice for the Open Source Investigative Field — Symposium on Fairness, Equality, and Diversity in Open Source Investigations, OpinioJuris.

How to join

The Field is in its founding phase. This is the moment to get in early, shape what it becomes, and connect with the first cohort of practitioners building it together.

To join or express interest:

Fill in the intake form here

Reach out directly: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com ; Or leave a comment below.

Tell us who you are, what you work on, where you’re based, and what you think The Field needs to do. That information will directly shape how the community is built.

There is no membership fee. No institutional gatekeeping. No prerequisite except the work.

Subscribe now

The Field was founded by Raja Althaibani. Read her work at Unembedded.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability— advising, training, writing, investigating, and building the infrastructure that helps practitioners and institutions respond to an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow.

Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law and accountability, and open-source digital documentation. She works with journalists, editors, researchers, lawyers, advocates, technologists, and institutions across sectors and geographies, advising on online harm, information disorder, and emerging technology; training practitioners to work with greater rigor and judgment; and building cross-sector communities and tools designed to make the field stronger, more inclusive, and less extractive.

Her work is defined by one consistent thread: closing the gap between complex systems and the people who need to understand, navigate, and hold them accountable.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, practical guides, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It publishes original reporting, case studies, curated resources, tools and templates for practitioners, and research and reading lists across the beats it covers.

Unembedded includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over—on how media covers harm, extremism, and algorithmic culture, and what better practice looks like— and The Field Dispatch, the working intelligence arm of The Field community of practice. She is the founder of The Field.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or via contact form; and website www.rajaalthaibani.com

From Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism, a guide for journalists, editors, producers, researchers, and media practitioners. Published here in parts. Each installment stands alone. The full picture builds across the series.

Killing Spectacle is part of ‘The Safari Is Over’, an ongoing series on media, harm, and the information landscape.

There’s a moment most journalists on this beat recognize, even if they don’t name it.

You’re pitching a story about a harmful online community, an AI abuse case, a radicalization pipeline. And somewhere in the process, the story migrates toward its most watchable part. The clip. The personality. The confrontation. The thing that makes an editor say: that.

It feels like journalism. It has texture and tension and a hook. But something has gone missing: the part that would actually change how the public understands what’s happening. The part that helps them identify where to direct action.

This guide is about that gap, and how to close it, deliberately.

What this guide is and isn’t

These are practices, not rules, drawn from years in this space, watching what holds and what collapses under scrutiny. They’re also shifts: things we have to actively unlearn before you can replace them with something more useful. Most of the bad instincts on this beat aren’t careless. They’re trained. They got rewarded. They got pieces commissioned and clips shared and panels booked. Unlearning them requires naming them first.

This is also a living document and a conversation. If you work on these beats— as a journalist, researcher, advocate, lawyer, technologist— what’s missing and what works belongs in here. Leave a comment or reach out directly. Everything useful goes into the guide, with credit.

How the full guide is structured

The 15 shifts are arranged across four phases: Framing (how you conceptualize and pitch the story before reporting begins), Rigor (how you verify and source in environments designed to mislead), Structure (how you shape and distribute the story without reproducing the harm), and Sustained Practice (how you protect and maintain this work inside institutions that don’t always reward it). The three shifts below are Phase 1. You don’t need to follow them sequentially, but the logic is cumulative, and each phase assumes the one before it.

The question that runs through all 15 shifts

Does this story increase public understanding, or does it redistribute attention?

Redistributing attention is easy. It generates clicks, and it can feel like exposure. But it rarely changes anything. Public understanding is harder to produce and harder to sell. It’s also the only thing journalism in this space can offer that the algorithm can’t.

What prompted this guide

This guide didn’t come from one story. It came from a pattern.

There is a structural problem in how online harm, extremism, and algorithmic culture get covered, and it shows up across formats, platforms, and beats. It’s not about bad journalists and storytellers. It’s about the gravitational pull of certain types of stories: ones that arrive pre-loaded with conflict, personality, and outrage, and make spectacle feel like investigation.

You know these stories.

The influencer radicalizing teenage boys, covered through his most inflammatory clips. The deepfake abuse case that leads with the viral moment and buries the policy vacuum. The AI system causing harm, reported as a curiosity rather than a systemic failure. The harassment campaign reconstructed around the abuser’s language rather than its cost to the target. The extremist community profiled through its most watchable members, never its recruitment infrastructure.

The Jihadi Johns and Andrew Tates—manufactured characters who understood exactly what the media would do with them, and built the spectacle, legitimacy, and reach they so desperately wanted accordingly. The alt-right figures who gamed outrage cycles to launder fringe ideology into mainstream debate. The misogynist podcasters whose revenue model runs on the very coverage claiming to expose them. The election disruptors who flood the zone knowing the correction will carry the lie further. The war crimes filmed and uploaded by perpetrators— state and non-state actors—because they knew journalists would distribute them.

In every case, the harmful actor understood the media environment better than the coverage did. And they know the media environment and its participants better than it knows itself.

These stories all have legitimate public interest at their core. The coverage often doesn’t find it because the spectacle is closer, faster, and easier to sell. That’s not a personal failure. It’s an editorial one.

And editorial choices can be made differently. This is a guide to making them differently: 15 shifts from spectacle-driven coverage to high-impact public interest reporting across online harm, extremism, AI, and algorithmic culture.

Shift 1: Pitch the system, not the spectacle

Unlearn: Anchor the pitch to a personality or incident.

Relearn: Pitch the system the incident reveals.

The most damaging instinct on this beat is reaching for a compelling figure or moment to sell a story. This is understandable, it’s how pitches get bought. But on beats involving harassment, extremism, or AI harm, incident-led coverage carries real costs: it re-traumatizes victims, amplifies the people causing harm, and normalizes what should remain structurally shocking. More practically: it produces stories that don’t survive the next news cycle. Incident-led coverage has a shelf life. System-led coverage has a subject.

What this looks like in practice

When AI-generated non-consensual images of a female student at a Louisiana middle school circulated last year, early coverage treated it as a conflict: a fight, an expulsion, a drama between teenagers. Readable. Thin.

Stronger reporting reframed the same facts around a policy vacuum: schools were applying outdated cyberbullying frameworks to a new type of harm and deepfake technology those laws never contemplated. No mechanism existed to respond, discipline, or protect. The incident was the entry point. The institution was the story.

One version ages out when the next incident lands. The other stays useful to every educator, parent, and policymaker who encounters the same gap. By focusing on the public-interest frame over spectacle, 8 more students were identified as victims of the same abuse, revealing a critical lack of oversight and accountability.

Editorial test:

Can you name the failing institution, platform, or policy in your first two paragraphs? If the story falls apart without the viral moment, you’re chasing spectacle.

Pitch frame to keep nearby:

The public needs to understand how [system] is responding to [harm] because it affects their ability to [protect themselves / hold someone accountable / make an informed decision].

Field note on AI and algorithmic beats specifically:

When a model or platform is implicated in harm, resist the pull toward anthropomorphizing the technology as the protagonist. The model isn’t the story. The decision to deploy it without safeguards, the gap between the terms of service and what the product actually does, the accountability structure that allowed the harm to scale, those are the story. Name the company. Name the design choice. Name the person who signed off.

Toolkit 1: Pitching the system when editors want the story

Before pitching, build a one-page map of the system you're investigating: the institution, the policy gap, the harm pathway, the people absorbing the cost. Kumu or a shared Miro board forces you to articulate the system before a word is written, and gives editors something concrete to look at beyond a clip or outrageous hook. AI-assisted document analysis (DocumentCloud Analyst, OCCRP Aleph) surfaces patterns across large document sets faster than manual reading. And maintain a running accountability file on the institutions on your beat (policy changes, enforcement actions, known gaps) so when an incident occurs, the system story is already half-reported.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 2: Conflict is the delivery system. Consequence is the story.

Unlearn: Let the most dramatic moment become the unit of analysis.

Relearn: Treat conflict as the delivery system. Report the consequence.

Conflict generates heat, and heat generates clicks. But heat dissipates, and if you’ve only reported the confrontation, nothing survives the news cycle.

Covering consequence is different. Consequence is what changed. Who gained power, money, reach, or legitimacy. What the people most affected did next. How institutions responded or didn’t, or built in deniability so they wouldn’t have to.

What this looks like in practice

Podcast formats built around confrontation and humiliation, Fresh & Fit being a well-documented case, tend to get covered through their worst and most outrageous clips. That coverage is reliable and easy to produce. It also explains nothing.

But it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t tell you how the format generates revenue, how engagement mechanics reward escalation, how humiliation becomes entertainment, or what that does to the young men watching. Consequence-led reporting asks: what changed as a result of this? Who built a platform, a business, a political foothold? Who lost their safety, their sense of what’s normal? Who absorbed the cost?

That’s where the story lives.

Editorial test:

What happened after the conflict? Who gained, measurably (in reach, revenue, or legitimacy) and who absorbed the damage?

If you can’t answer both, the reporting isn’t finished.

Field note

Consequence is harder to report because it's often disaggregated and delayed. The influencer's revenue doesn't appear in the clip. The behavioral shift in the audience doesn't show up in the incident report. This is partly by design, platforms and bad actors alike benefit from keeping consequence invisible. Closing the gap requires a different sourcing strategy: researchers, platform transparency data, former employees, and the people most affected tracked over time, not quoted once. Phase 4 of this guide addresses the longitudinal obligation in full.

Toolkit 2: Following consequence when platforms obscure it

For platform and influencer revenue: Social Blade tracks estimated YouTube and Twitch earnings; SimilarWeb tracks audience growth and traffic sources; OpenCorporates surfaces corporate structures. For political influence: InfluenceMap. For moving from "here's the personality" to "here's the infrastructure": Gephi visualizes how content, accounts, and communities connect. For high-volume content beats, AI transcription (Whisper) and synthesis tools (NotebookLM) let you track rhetoric and escalation patterns across thousands of hours of material, the slow radicalization pipeline, not just the viral moment. And set calendar reminders at 3, 6, and 12 months after publication. The follow-up is itself a reporting method.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 3: Center the burden-bearers, not the perpetrators

Unlearn: Let perpetrators set the terms of the story.

Relearn: Center the people who carry the long-term burden.

This is the structural failure that runs deepest, and the one most resistant to change because it’s baked into how stories get told.

On extremism, harassment, and abuse beats, perpetrators routinely set the frame. They’re quotable, accessible, often actively seeking coverage and eager for attention. Victims and survivors appear later : as context, as reaction, as proof that something bad happened. That structure isn’t neutral. It reproduces the hierarchy of the harm itself.

Centering burden-bearers isn’t a fairness question. It’s a reporting accuracy question. The people who live with the long-tail consequences of these systems understand them differently, and often more completely, than the people producing them. Their testimony is evidence. Not color.

What this looks like in practice

Amnesty International's Toxic Twitter research didn’t focus on what abusers said, it focused on what the abuse cost. Women changed how they used platforms. Many withdrew from public life online. Some feared for their physical safety offline. The damage was measurable, documented, and largely absent from coverage that kept returning to perpetrators and their rhetoric. That research made harm legible in terms institutions could act on. It named the hidden tax. It showed the invisible majority.

Editorial test:

Who has the most to lose in this story? Are they present with name, context, and consequence in the first third of your piece?

If not, you’re reporting the fire. Not the building that keeps catching.

Field note on source relationships

Burden-bearers are often sources who've been burned by coverage before: used as a single quote, stripped of context, left exposed after publication with no follow-up. The relationship requires more than a consent form. It requires transparency about how the material will be used, what decisions you'll make about their identification, and what your obligations are after the piece goes live. Phase 2 of this guide addresses this in depth, specifically, how to handle sources who are also subjects, and what rigor looks like without cruelty.

Toolkit 3: Reaching burden-bearers and protecting them

Secure communications are baseline: SecureDrop for newsrooms; Signal with disappearing messages for individual reporters. The Freedom of the Press Foundation's operational security guides are shareable with sources, not just practitioners. For community-based sourcing, the antidote to the parachute model, build relationships with survivor advocacy groups, mutual aid networks, and community organizations before you need them for a story. Meedan's Check enables collaborative verification with input from affected communities, valuable for content in languages or contexts outside a reporter's fluency. And the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma carries peer-reviewed, practitioner-tested guidance on trauma-informed practice. It belongs in your working reference, not just your reading list.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

What these three shifts have in common

They all require resisting the pull toward what is easiest to see, film, quote, and sell.

That pull is real. Editors want the hook. Platforms reward the clip. Audiences click on conflict. None of that is going away. And none of it is an excuse, either.

These shifts aren’t about producing slower journalism or quieter journalism. They’re about producing journalism with a longer half-life: stories that build public understanding instead of borrowing its attention.

Phase 1 of this guide is conceptual. It changes how you frame the story before you report it. The shifts in Phases 2, 3, and 4 build on this foundation: rigor without cruelty, structure that makes systems visible rather than personalities legible, and the sustained practice of doing this work inside institutions that don’t always reward it. A story with the right frame but weak verification is still a weak story. These phases are cumulative. Each one assumes the work of the one before.

Because I care—and because I want us to win—here are two bonus shifts to carry with you from Part I before you start reporting: treating virality as distribution evidence, and placing the incident within the larger pattern. Both are about closing the gap before the first word is written.

Killing Spectacle (Part I-Continued): Framing the Story — Two Bonus Shifts Before You Report on Online Harm and Extremism

Read it here.

The Field

The practices above are easier to sustain inside a community of people working on the same problems than alone. That’s what The Field is: a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technologists working at this intersection, built on the principle that the people with the most situational knowledge are often those with the least institutional power, and that better practice requires closing that gap deliberately. If this is your beat, wherever you are, it’s yours to join.

Join The Field: Fill out the intake form or reach out to me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

The Frontier

These three shifts will make individual stories better. They won’t fix the structural conditions that make better journalism hard to sustain: the revenue models that reward speed over depth, the synthetic media environment that is actively contaminating the evidentiary record, and the reach gap that means the reporting most needed by communities closest to the harm is the reporting least likely to reach them. Each of those problems gets its full treatment in the phase where it becomes most acute, synthetic media and verification in Part 2, the reach gap in Part 3, the revenue question in Part 4. Naming them here is a promise, not a deferral. The frontier is the reason the guide exists. Craft alone doesn’t close it.

Up next— Killing Spectacle, Part 2: Rigor without cruelty.

How to verify claims in spaces designed to mislead, including a synthetic media environment where the detection tools are always one cycle behind the fakes. How to handle sources who are also subjects, and what informed consent actually looks like as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time form. And the specific problem no one talks about clearly enough: what you do with evidence you can verify but cannot safely publish, and how that shapes what you can responsibly claim.

Part 2 of this guide is where the frame you built in Part 1 either holds or falls apart. The craft is in making it hold.

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Two additional shifts to consider before you start reporting: treating virality as distribution evidence, and placing the incident within the larger pattern. Both are about closing the gap before the first word is written.

Killing Spectacle (Part I-Continued): Frame the Story Right with Two More Shifts (read here)

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If this is your beat, or someone you edit, teach, or commission, send it to them directly and invite them to join The Field, our new community of practice. The journalists and media practitioners who need this most are rarely the ones looking for it.

These aren’t universal rules. They’re practices drawn from years in this space. What works in a long-form investigation won’t always survive a breaking news brief. Context matters. This guide is a conversation, leave a comment or reach me directly with what’s missing and what works. What’s useful goes into the guide, with credit.

About the author. Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability— advising, training, investigating, and building tools for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow.

She writes Unembedded, which includes the ongoing series The Safari Is Over ; and founded The Field, a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, and technical practitioners working on these beats.

inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Join The Field

New here? This essay is part of The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere, a series on the systems and incentives that have made the manosphere more visible, more influential, and more misunderstood. Read the series introduction and announcement here.

When Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere1 landed on Netflix last month, it seemed to promise a public service. At last, here was a mainstream documentary promising to enter an ecosystem that has spent years radicalizing grievance, laundering misogyny as self-help, and turning humiliation into a business model.

But the film mistakes so-called access for understanding.

Theroux is the undisputed master of the faux-naïve encounter: the blinking, bumbling Englishman whose disarming politeness usually coaxes the truth out of fanatics. For years, that method worked because exposure still carried moral weight. To be seen clearly—saying vile things aloud, revealing dehumanizing beliefs, and performing your own moral squalor for the camera—was, in itself, compromising.

But in the neon-lit gyms and high-rise apartments of the so-called “manosphere”2, his act feels less like a method than a valuable asset inside a content machine run by a motley crew of savvy hustlers and manfluencers3. Rather than a rigorous inquiry into the system that makes the manosphere profitable, reproducible, politically useful, and dangerous, the documentary plays out as a digital safari.

Across its 91-minute runtime, Theroux gawks at hyper-masculine grifters and flamboyant villains, offering viewers a guided tour through the spectacle while obscuring the machinery, incentives, and deeper actors sustaining it.

But who can really blame him?

In one scene, we watch as 24-year-old British TikTok influencer HS TikkyTokky, née Harrison Sullivan, casually presents his phone to show Louis a video of himself receiving oral sex in a club toilet just hours earlier.

Sullivan, right, appears amused and almost triumphant after showing Theroux the graphic video, bragging that he had been “out late getting content.” Source: Netflix

Theroux appears visibly disgusted. Source: Netflix

We see the Fresh & Fit podcast studio functioning like a digital-age Roman coliseum, where Myron Gaines and his co-host invite young, unprepared women onto the podcast only to badger and degrade them before a live audience of thousands.

Even Theroux, long practiced in meeting extremists and fanatics, appears visibly astonished by the sheer spectacle of it all.

And that is precisely the problem. The manosphere is not just a collection of obnoxious men with ring lights and microphones, nor merely a niche internet pathology. It is a networked commercial ecosystem built on grievance, gender panic, extremist ideology, and algorithmic escalation. It monetizes male insecurity, packages domination as clarity, and converts resentment into recurring revenue.

That is where the documentary goes wrong. By treating the manosphere mainly as personality, or as “toxic masculinity” embodied by a young, amoral generation, it mistakes spectacle for explanation. More broadly, it reflects a recurring failure in mainstream media: when coverage locks onto the face, the clip, and the performance, structure recedes behind character. Systemic critique collapses into character study.

Theroux leans into that logic. He centers the individual as both narrative engine and easy-to-digest villain, while sparing Netflix and other platforms a more unpleasant analysis of the algorithmic incentives and systemic forces that built these men in the first place.

More importantly, he misses a crucial point: these men are not simply being themselves. They are performing profitable characters for a global audience. If Theroux had set up the conditions to break the façade, or brought in someone with deeper knowledge of the space, a more revealing truth about both these figures and the ecosystem they inhabit might have emerged.

Instead, he falls into a profound irony. In trying to expose the spectacle, he reproduces its logic, prioritizing performance over systemic accountability. He gives a global stage to the movement’s preferred symbols of success— supercars, crypto wealth, and the livestreamed objectification of women— while looking past the wreckage and the invisible majority left in their wake.

The deeper question is not simply what these men do, but what kind of system rewards this behavior in the first place.

The manosphere does not run on conviction alone. To stay solvent in the attention economy, red-pill influencers have learned to commodify misogyny and spectacle, paying a kind of mandatory tax of the macabre to remain visible.

@hsullivan#hstikkytokky #fyp #edmatthewstokky #viral #videoviral

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They engage in clip-farming and context stripping, distilling hate into its most viral form for algorithms that reward the most jagged edges of the human psyche. Under incentives that reward outrage, humiliation, and extremity, they monetize the demolition of their own dignity4, knowing that only the most visceral provocations reliably break through the noise5.

Research points to precisely this logic: repeated exposure, recommendation loops, normalization, and monetized escalation. Seen through that lens, many of the documentary’s most infamous moments look different. They are not just signs of moral rot. They are also signs of market discipline.

What looks like shamelessness is often evidence that private life has been fully absorbed into production. Sex, shame, cruelty, confrontation, humiliation—nothing remains outside the feed if it can be monetized within it. Yet the documentary returns to these scenes as if their extremity were the deepest thing about them. It is not.

The deeper fact is that this ecosystem now requires escalation. In a saturated market of outrage, neutrality is death, moderation is invisibility, and dignity does not scale. The men in this space are not only rewarded for transgression; many are trapped by the need to intensify it. That would have been the documentary’s real subject, had it trusted the harder story.

And once you see that escalation is not incidental but structural, the ecosystem begins to look less like chaos than hierarchy and ideological convergence.

At the top sit the better-insulated operators: figures like the Andrew Tates, with diversified revenue, political adjacency, private channels, event circuits, loyal fan economies, and off-platform leverage.

Beneath them is a much larger class of clippers, podcasters, streamers, outrage merchants, and masculinity entrepreneurs who depend almost entirely on algorithmic visibility. They posture as sovereign men while living in profound dependence on Big Tech and the upper tiers of manosphere hierarchy.

This hidden hierarchy matters because it makes the ecosystem legible. It shows who is protected and who is disposable. It explains why “community” so often turns out to be a marketing fiction rather than brotherhood or connection.

It also reveals that many of the loudest figures, like those featured in the documentary, are not architects so much as products: profitable, vicious, disposable, replaceable.

The hierarchy also reproduces itself through recruitment. More established operators do not simply build audiences; they court younger influencers, pull them into their orbit, and turn them into feeder figures for the brand. The point is not just ideological alignment. It is audience capture.

Sneako illustrates the pattern. He first built an audience as a teenage YouTube creator long before entering the manosphere, then was drawn into Andrew Tate’s orbit and recast as a younger, more platform-native extension of that world, quickly earning a reputation as Tate’s protégé.6

His more recent fallout with Tate reveals the fragility of loyalty in the red-pill economy. What looks like mentorship is often a form of capture: the absorption of new faces, new markets, and new streams of grievance into the machine. In a hierarchy built on clout, access, and followers, conflict is never merely personal. It is also a struggle over succession—over who gets to inherit the brand, the audience, and the authority of the “Top G.”

In that sense, the manosphere can begin to resemble a minor geopolitics of influence: alliances are tactical, loyalty is conditional, and succession battles are fought through audiences as much as ideology.

In a recent video, Sneako put it this way:

“The Matrix sees slop and clout, and they love you. They give you everything […] But once you speak to people that are different than you—that is when the vultures come out of nowhere and swarm.”

That hierarchy, and the recruitment funnel it depends on, also help explain who benefits from keeping the system volatile. The manosphere does not exist in isolation. It is embedded in a wider ecosystem of actors who derive value from that volatility: ideologues, extremists, and power brokers whose reach extends far beyond fitness tips and lurid scenes.

Researchers increasingly describe the manosphere as a networked ecosystem in which misogynistic narratives circulate across overlapping subcultures, often intersecting with other forms of extremism and moving beyond the niche digital margins they once appeared to occupy.

Experts have also repeatedly pointed to overlaps with far-right ecosystems, including white supremacist and anti-democratic currents. Some recent counter-extremism research suggests that today’s radicalization landscape no longer fits neatly into clean ideological boxes. What investigators increasingly encounter instead are blurred, unstable, and overlapping formations.

That ambiguity is part of the danger. It makes these ecosystems harder to track and harder to counter precisely because grievance, entertainment, influencer culture, and ideological radicalization now bleed into one another.

Those overlaps are no longer peripheral. Figures like Sneako and Nick Fuentes help show how misogynistic branding, far-right politics, antisemitism, and celebrity spectacle increasingly merge and spill into one another.

A recent viral clip of Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and others partying in a Miami nightclub while Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” played in the background is a crude but telling example of that convergence: misogynist influencer culture, far-right provocation, celebrity antisemitism, and platformed spectacle collapsing into the same scene.

By chasing visible manosphere figures without following these ideological mergers to their outer edges, Theroux misses the deeper and more dangerous intersections with actors like Nick Fuentes, who use alpha rhetoric and gender grievance as Trojan horses for broader radicalization and incitement.

That is why the documentary, for all its so-called access, never really gets “inside” the manosphere.

Instead, it raises a critical ethical question: does the film function as a critique, or merely as a larger stage for the reciprocal grift?

By prioritizing shocking, performative moments over structural analysis, the documentary leans into spectacle journalism, where the line between interrogation and amplification becomes dangerously thin, creating a parasitic symbiosis in which legacy media and the renegade manosphere perform for one another, each using the other’s platform to reinforce its own relevance, visibility, and clout. It exposes the banality of the scam behind the curated personas, yet remains entangled in the same attention economy that sustains them.

For all its bile and spectacle, the most striking thing about the documentary is how “meh” it feels. Packaged as awareness, its rhetoric is often barely distinguishable from the sensationalist content and extremist provocations already circulating through news cycles, political discourse, official rhetoric, and algorithm feeds.

If anything, the film feels tame because we are already trapped in a feedback loop where the bar for outrage keeps rising and the machinery of radicalization has become ordinary.

This is not a fringe problem, and it is not far from home. Research suggests that manosphere content now forms part of the online environment many people, including young users, can encounter directly. Related UK data also show that 19 percent of those arrested for terrorism-related offenses in 2023 were aged 17 and under.

That does not mean every misogynistic influencer space is a terrorism pipeline. It does mean the wider ecology of radicalization, grievance, and digitally mediated harm can no longer be treated as niche.

Not when so many young users encounter fragments of it directly and daily.

Not when its styles and logics have already leaked so thoroughly into public discourse.

Not when the bar for outrage has been pushed so high that degradation now reads as ordinary content.

And the effects of spectacle journalism and media storytelling are not incidental. They are corrosive.

On audiences, it heightens attention and emotional arousal while often eroding credibility, especially in hard news7. Over time, it breeds fatigue, cynicism, avoidance, and a public that is overstimulated but underinformed.

For journalism, it shifts incentives from verification and depth to visibility, personalization, and performance.

For public discourse, it favors scandal, conflict, and personality over policy, process, and structure.

For democracy, the problem is not simply vulgarity. It is that spectacle weakens the conditions democratic judgment requires: trust, shared factuality, deliberative attention, and sustained engagement with public life.

And for the invisible majority8, it turns casualties into background. The people who profit from attention stay at the center of the frame; the people who bear the costs are pushed to its edges.

We are already saturated by an attention economy that trains us to treat humiliation, conflict, and dehumanization as normal. To keep platforming spectacle at the expense of a better-informed public is professional malpractice.

It is time to move beyond spectacle and cynical grift and start examining this as a crisis of connection, accountability, power, and political formation.

The safari is over.

Key takeaways

The manosphere is not a roster of outrageous men. It is a networked commercial ecosystem, and reporting and storytelling should treat it as such.

When coverage centers the performer, it risks mistaking access for understanding and spectacle for explanation.

Extremity is not always revelation. Often it is market discipline: content shaped by platforms, monetization, and the demand for visibility.

The real story is usually off-camera: hierarchy, incentives, audience funnels, ideological overlap, and who profits from amplification.

Spectacle-centered coverage can unintentionally strengthen the system it claims to expose by routing attention, legitimacy, and curiosity back to its most marketable figures.

Good reporting and storytelling should ask not only what was said, but what is being optimized, who is being recruited, what is being normalized, and what has been pushed out of frame.

The people most visible in these ecosystems are not always the most powerful. Many are replaceable performers inside a larger machine.

When coverage keeps the loudest performer at the center, the people harmed by the system become background.

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Companion resources

Because this problem extends beyond one documentary or one subculture, this essay is accompanied by additional practical resources, publishing in the upcoming days and weeks:

• A guide for journalists and editors on avoiding spectacle, reducing amplification, and reporting the system rather than the performance.

• A separate audience tip sheet for readers, parents, educators, and viewers on how to recognize spectacle, pause escalation, and ask better questions about what platforms are rewarding.

• Practitioner’s note: We Are Not Your Spectacle A critique for Western Media Practitioners, from Your Arab American Peer.

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Note to Readers

This essay is the first in a series, The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere. Using the documentary as a starting point, the series examines the wider systems, cultures, and conditions that have made the manosphere more visible and more misunderstood. Read more here.

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Media, Research, and Professional Inquiries

For media requests, speaking invitations, consultations, collaboration inquiries, or professional contact, please reach out at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or connect via Substack or LinkedIn messenger or via my website contact form.

Read the first essay in the series here: Inside the Manosphere I: The Media Spectacle Is a Distraction

There is now an entire media economy devoted to making extremism impossible to ignore while doing far less to make it intelligible.

That problem sits at the center of this new series, The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere, which examines the manosphere not as an internet curiosity or passing media spectacle, but as part of a wider ecosystem of misogyny, hate, extremism, and violence evolving in plain sight.

Using the Louis Theroux documentary as a starting point, and placing it alongside other pop-cultural texts, news stories, case studies, and emerging social trends, the series explores both the shared dynamics and the important differences across these formations.

It asks two central questions: what does it mean to live in a media environment that makes extremism easier to consume, circulate, and act on than to understand, and what can be done to interrupt and mitigate that harm more effectively, ethically, and responsibly?

This is no longer a fringe issue, if it ever truly was. The overlap between manosphere culture, broader far-right ecosystems, and more mainstream reactionary politics has become too consequential to dismiss as online spectacle or subcultural noise. What is at stake here is not only cultural analysis, but the public interest, public safety, and national security.

Across the series, I examine the structures that shape and sustain these worlds: media and journalism, platform design, Big Tech and its incentives, emerging technologies and AI, regulatory and legislative bottlenecks, policy failures, and the public habits that can either intensify harm or help contain it. The aim is not simply to interpret the spectacle, but to make it legible.

The series is written for both practitioners and general readers, with particular relevance for journalists, researchers, educators, policy specialists, legal analysts, trust and safety teams, and security practitioners. It combines analysis with practical literacy: how to recognize these dynamics early, how to respond more effectively, and how to avoid making them worse through weak analysis, careless language, poor ethics, or ineffective tools.

Series Rollout

The series will be published here on Substack over the coming months, generally on a fortnightly cadence. Alongside the main essays, I’ll also be publishing companion pieces, practice notes, source breakdowns, practical explainers, and media-literacy resources.

The first essay, “Inside the Manosphere I: The Media Spectacle Is a Distraction,” is now live. Upcoming companion materials will include a practice note on the relationship between spectacle journalism and amplification, along with tip sheets for practitioners and audiences on how to recognize, resist, and avoid reinforcing spectacle-driven narratives.

The next installment turns to the emotional economy beneath the spectacle, and to the thing most people still mistake for its primary product.

The Full Map — What’s Published and What’s Coming

THE SAFARI IS OVER Analysis Series on the manosphere, media, power, and the systems that produced both

Published:

• Inside the Manosphere I: The Media Spectacle Is a Distraction

• Inside the Manosphere II: The Donut Shop and the Ruins (new)- Publish date: Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Forthcoming:

• Inside the Manosphere III: Affective Combat and the Paper Tiger (Old Establishment vs. The New Media Renegade (Piers Morgan, HS Sullivan, Systemic Convergence) - Publishing May 6, 2026

• Inside the Manosphere IV: The Invisible Majority (framework, reality check, burden-bearers) - Publishing May 16, 2026

• Companion practice notes and tip sheets tied to the manosphere and THE FIELD.

THE FIELD DISPATCH Working intelligence and practice resources for practitioners

Published:

• Killing Spectacle Part 1: Three Shifts for Journalists Who Cover Online Harm

• Killing Spectacle Part 1 Continued: Two Bonus Shifts Before You Report

• The Field: A Community of Practice (announcement and call to action)

Forthcoming:

• Killing Spectacle Part 2: Rigor Without Cruelty

• Killing Spectacle Parts 3 and 4 (structure, sustained practice)

• Companion practice notes and tip sheets tied to the manosphere series

• Media literacy resources for general audiences

Where to Follow

Substack (@rajaalthaibani): full essays, companion pieces, and extended analysis

Instagram (@raja_althaibani): shorter posts, bite-sized educational slides, visual explainers, live commentary, links, and frequent updates.

LinkedIn (@rajaalthaibani): practitioner-focused reflections, applied takeaways, and professional context

Website: rajaalthaibani.com

To follow the full series and receive new installments directly, subscribe on Substack here:

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Media, Research, and Professional Inquiries

For media requests, speaking invitations, consultations, collaboration inquiries, or professional contact, please reach out at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or connect via Substack or LinkedIn messenger or via my website contact form.