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

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 coming soon: rajaalthaibani.com

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

Subscribe now

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.