The moral panic over online misogyny is in full swing. Turn on the TV, go online or open up a newspaper and, soon enough, you’ll run into some story about the terrible dangers of the “manosphere” and its deadly allure to hordes of young men.

Over the weekend, coverage of the dreaded manosphere was hard to miss, with one Guardian piece inviting its readers to consider a plot line repurposed from other moral panics: “What happens when your partner falls into the ‘manosphere’?”. It opened with Samantha’s story about her relationship with a seemingly progressive Swedish man — emotionally open and in therapy — who, after their breakup, revealed his true beliefs, claiming “men are more sexual than women” and “men and women can’t be friends.”

She later learned he had been radicalized during the pandemic through a men’s mental health group influenced by Jordan Peterson, all without her noticing any red flags. The article warns that her story isn’t unique, and quotes polling data from the activist group Hope Not Hate, according to which 41% of young men — from a sample of 2,000 people across the UK aged 16 to 24 — “support Andrew Tate”.

On the same day as the Guardian piece, The Telegraph ran a story with the headline: “Andrew Tate ‘phenomena’ fueling misogyny in schools, say teachers.” Among several unnamed teachers quoted, one recalled with horror how a group of boys opted to write an essay for their English class on why Tate is the “GOAT” (Greatest of All Time). Others relayed that some boys have taken to barking at female teachers or ignoring them altogether. Then on Sunday, The Times published a story on how some incels could benefit from the help of dating coaches, a day after running a piece promoting young male influencers who could serve as an “antidote” to Tate.

With all this frenzied coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that online misogyny is everywhere and that its embrace is so seductive that even the most liberal-minded men can be ensnared by it. But the truth is rather more complicated, and this is for at least two reasons. First, support for Tate may not be as widespread as Hope Not Hate suggests. According to a 2023 YouGov poll, only 12% of British men view him positively, although this rises to 27% among 18 to 29-year-old men. In another YouGov survey, it was found that one in six 6-15-year-old boys (17%) have a positive opinion of Tate, including 23% of 13-15-year-olds.

Second, even when young boys do seemingly express support for Tate, it is eminently possible that they are engaging in a form of play that is intended to mock or provoke those in authority. A few years ago, my then 15-year-old nephew was quite taken with Tate, not because he agreed with him or took him seriously, but because it annoyed his parents.

Of course, violent misogyny is no laughing matter, and women are abused every day by despotic and weak men. But it’s still necessary to call out the frenzied alarmism of the prevailing discourse on online misogyny, where the manosphere is accorded far more causal power and reach than it actually possesses, and where mounting paranoia over young boys is clearly detrimental to their development and self-esteem.

It’s also necessary to point out the twisted incentives driving the current moral panic about online misogyny. No newspaper or website is going to publish a piece titled, “Male support for Andrew Tate is exaggerated, experts say” or “The boys are OK.” Instead, all the incentives are stacked up the other way: “My friend was radicalized by online misogyny. It really is that easy.” (That’s a real one.)

A moral panic rewards exaggeration, stokes paranoia, and stigmatizes those on the receiving end. If we want to support boys rather than scapegoat them, we need less righteous indignation, more honesty, and a lot more trust in the quiet male majority who are muddling along and minding their own business.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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