The Algorithm Has a Discipleship Strategy (Part One)

By Jason Masters FAICD PFIIA, LinkedIn

This is part one of two. Part one asks what algorithmic feeds are teaching boys and what Christian formation offers in reply. Part two, Church Schools and the Culture They Form, asks what churches owe the schools that carry their names.

The social media algorithm has no faith, no conscience and no intention of making disciples. It does not need any of them.

It has repetition. It has intimate knowledge of what keeps a person watching. It has a business model that rewards attention, including angry, frightened, and humiliated attention. Give it a teenage boy looking for a workout, confidence or somewhere to belong, and it will offer him a whole account of what a man is for.

Some creators use these platforms to build helpful communities. Others draw boys towards old and dangerous ideas.

Why call it a discipleship strategy? The phrase is an interpretation, not a technical description. A recommender system does not believe what it recommends. It still performs one of formation’s oldest tasks. It repeats a story until the story begins to feel like the world.

What the evidence does and does not say

On 2 September 2026, Chanel Contos used a National Press Club address to argue that algorithmic feeds should be opt-in rather than the default (Busch, 2026). A small but transparent experiment conducted by Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre underscores the urgency of her argument. Researchers tracked ten simulated accounts representing 16 and 18 year old boys on blank phones, five using TikTok and five using YouTube Shorts. Every account encountered toxic content within 23 minutes and manosphere content within 26 minutes, including accounts engaging only with generic interests. By the final round, after 400 videos, 76 per cent of the content recommended on TikTok and 78 per cent on YouTube Shorts was coded as toxic. Much of the reactionary and conspiracy material was anti-transgender (Ging et al., 2024).

That is evidence of a mechanism, not a prevalence estimate. Ten artificial accounts do not tell us what every boy sees or how a real teenager interprets it. The experiment does show how quickly a recommender moves from ordinary interests to rigid masculinity, misogyny and hostility towards LGBTIQA+ people, and how fast repetition intensifies once the system detects engagement.

The broader pattern is better established. In its May 2026 position paper, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found that recommender systems repeatedly expose users to harmful material, with cumulative effects greater than any single post. Boys and young men are consistently exposed to manosphere material whether or not they seek it. Fitness, self-help and advice content serve as a gateway to increasingly extreme messages. The systems usually optimise engagement without reliably distinguishing positive engagement from negative engagement (eSafety Commissioner, 2026a).

That is the sourced fact. Platform design amplifies and repeats harmful ideas about women, LGBTIQA+ people, power and masculinity.

The next step is an inference. Christian formation also works through stories, habits, exemplars and repetition. Churches are not competing only with bad information. They are competing with a formation system available in every spare minute, from bedroom to bus to classroom and back.

The distinction matters. A sermon correcting Andrew Tate will not undo a week of personalised repetition. Information answers a proposition. Formation requires a community.

Boys are not the enemy

The most dangerous Christian response would treat boys as problems waiting to become perpetrators. That response repeats the manosphere’s own lie, that public life has divided into camps and care for women requires contempt for men.

The Man Box study by Jesuit Social Services (2024) surveyed more than 3,500 Australian men aged 18 to 45. Most rejected rigid rules of masculinity. Even so, 36 per cent felt pressure to follow them and 24 per cent personally believed them. The men most strongly endorsing those rules reported much higher rates of violence, suicidal thinking, problem gambling and binge drinking.

The study shows association, not a single chain of causation. It does not prove a social media post produces violence. It does show the same model of manhood harms women and men at once. Dominance, emotional silence and control are not gifts to boys. They are constraints sold as strength.

The manosphere recognises needs churches sometimes refuse to name. Boys want competence. They want friendship, purpose, dignity and an account of why their lives matter. Some are lonely. Some are frightened about work, housing, bodies or relationships. Contos is right to insist these concerns are valid (Busch, 2026). The exploitation begins when an industry turns them into evidence that women, feminism, migrants or queer people stole a future belonging to men.

Some of the boys receiving this content are themselves gay, bisexual, trans or questioning. The feed teaches them their own existence is the problem. A church that wants to reach boys must reach these boys too, and say so.

Christian communities should be able to say two things without hesitation. Your pain is real. The person you have been taught to blame is not your enemy. This will also require difficult reflection by some Christian communities.

What Australian boys say about help-seeking

The Man Cave, a preventative mental health charity delivering school programs on masculinity, brings the question closer to the boys themselves (The Man Cave, n.d.). Its research with Flinders University adds what the adult Man Box study lacks, direct evidence from adolescent boys.

In a 2026 conference abstract, researchers from Flinders University and The Man Cave analysed baseline surveys from 3,729 students aged 12 to 17, with a mean age of 14. Boys who more strongly endorsed stereotypical masculine norms reported less confidence in seeking help from professionals and from informal supports, including friends, adults and school staff. The largest differences separated the boys with the lowest and highest endorsement of those norms (Moriarty et al., 2026).

That baseline result is an association, not proof the norms caused an individual boy to avoid help. The program follow-up needs equal care. Only 136 baseline responses were linked to a survey three months later. Within that smaller group, endorsement of masculine stereotypes fell by a statistically significant but small amount (Cohen’s d = 0.27). The finding is encouraging. The attrition means the study cannot establish a population-wide program effect or rule out selection bias (Moriarty et al., 2026).

An independent Monash University evaluation commissioned by VicHealth helps explain what such interventions do and do not achieve. Evaluators found The Man Cave created a credible space for vulnerability and empathy and appeared to improve knowledge and attitudes about aggression and violence. One boy described the obstacle after the workshop: ‘It’s harder to create a serious space without, like, an adult figure’ (Elliott et al., 2022, p. 28).

The same evaluation found no significant improvement in participants’ confidence to challenge aggression, violence or sexist behaviour. Its conclusion was not that the conversation failed. Knowledge changes more readily than behaviour. It recommended multiple or longer sessions, practical tools and trained facilitators, describing one-off sessions as a beginning rather than an end (Elliott et al., 2022). That raises the question at the centre of a church response. How often must the healthier message be reinforced when social media delivers its competing message every day?

A strong workshop opens a door. A community keeps the room open and keeps the repetition regular, honest and consistent with the message.

The biblical text: ‘Not so among you’

Mark 10 does not begin with a lecture about masculinity. James and John ask Jesus for the best seats when glory arrives. The other disciples become angry, perhaps because two of them tried to secure privately what all of them wanted.

Jesus names the ordinary political model around them. Rulers ‘lord it over’ others, and great people exercise authority over those below. Then comes the turn: ‘But it is not so among you’ (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition [NRSVue], 2021, Mark 10:42 to 43). This community measures greatness by service, and Jesus interprets his own life in terms of giving rather than domination.

That is the biblical text in context. Male disciples dispute rank. Jesus answers by rejecting status expressed through control.

The interpretation I draw is narrower than saying every ambition is sinful or every form of authority oppressive. Jesus does not abolish agency, courage or leadership. He changes their direction. Power is judged by what it gives, whom it protects and whether it is exercised without turning another person into an object.

That makes Mark 10 a direct challenge to influencer masculinity built on domination. A man does not become great by having the most control over women, the most money, the hardest body or the last word. ‘Not so among you’ is not an embarrassed retreat from manhood. It is Jesus’ refusal to let domination define it.

Love made visible

Jesus gives the same challenge a positive form in John 13: ‘love one another’ as he has loved them (NRSVue, 2021, John 13:34 to 35). In context this is not a command to feel warmly. It follows the washing of the disciples’ feet and points towards the cross. Love is a practice of relinquishing status, telling the truth, receiving another person’s dignity and seeking their good. Domination tells a boy other people exist to confirm his worth. Jesus gives his disciples a different measure, a life recognisable by the quality of its love.

Jesus’ encounters with women show what that love looks like across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, reputation and religious belonging. At the well in John 4, he asks a Samaritan woman for water and engages her in a serious theological conversation. The disciples are astonished that he is speaking with a woman. The narrative is not. Her testimony brings people from her city to meet him. John records that the meeting occurred at noon. John does not say she came then because she was sexually shamed. That familiar sermon detail should not carry more than the text says (NRSVue, 2021, John 4:4 to 42).

In Luke 7, a male host silently reduces the woman anointing Jesus’ feet to ‘what kind of woman’ she is. Jesus turns towards her, receives her act, names the hospitality his host withheld and sends her in peace. Luke does not identify her as Mary Magdalene or call her a sex worker. The contrast is sharper without that later stereotype. The respectable man sees a category. Jesus sees the woman, her action, her faith and her capacity to love (NRSVue, 2021, Luke 7:36 to 50).

These are not sentimental side stories. They form the men watching Jesus. He teaches male disciples to receive truth, witness and ministry from women rather than treating women as temptations, prizes, servants or evidence in contests over male honour.

Repentance that faces the harm

The Old Testament contains men recognising wrong done to women, although the recognition is often late and incomplete. In Genesis 38, Judah is prepared to have Tamar killed until her evidence exposes his own failure to provide the security he owed her. He then admits she is ‘more in the right than I’. Repentance begins when the man with social power stops managing his reputation and tells the truth about the woman he has blamed (NRSVue, 2021, Genesis 38:24 to 26).

Second Samuel offers both confession and warning. David uses royal power to take Bathsheba and arrange Uriah’s death. Only after Nathan’s confrontation does he say, ‘I have sinned against the Lord’. The confession matters. The story should not be reduced to the restoration of a fallen king. Uriah remains dead. Bathsheba has endured David’s taking and the death of her child. The consequences spread through the royal household. Repentance that faces only God becomes another way of making the harmed woman disappear (NRSVue, 2021, 2 Samuel 11:1 to 12:13).

Part two follows the next chapter, where David’s anger produces no justice for the next Tamar, into the institutions that still protect the house rather than the person harmed within it.

The tradition: formation takes practice

Christian tradition has understood discipleship as more than the transfer of correct ideas. Catechesis, worship, shared meals, confession, service and the company of older believers form people by repetition. The tradition is diverse, and it has often taught what the recommender system now repeats. Churches have preached male headship, opposed women’s ordination and treated feminism as a threat to the family. Some still do, and some wrap hostility to LGBTIQA+ people in the language of kindness. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recorded the cost of institutional self-protection in every major Australian denomination, my own included. Research within the Anglican Church found intimate partner violence among churchgoers at rates equal to or higher than the general population (Powell & Pepper, 2021). A church cannot name the algorithm’s lie while repeating its own version from the pulpit. That history should make the church humbler, not silent.

The useful insight is that formation requires practices and people. The feed repeats. A faithful community must also repeat. Dignity is not dominance. Vulnerability is not failure. Women are neighbours rather than prizes. Queer people are not an explanation for someone else’s discomfort. Service is not humiliation. Asking for help is not surrender.

Those sentences become credible when boys see adults live them.

What your church should do now

First, ask boys what their feeds are teaching them. Do not begin with an interrogation about which influencer they follow. Ask what the videos say a successful man looks like, what they promise, what they blame and what they make hard to admit. Curiosity keeps the relationship open. Ridicule hands the boy back to the influencer who already told him nobody else would understand.

Second, make non-dominating masculinity visible. Your church needs men who lead without performing invulnerability, apologise without collapsing, listen to women without demanding praise and befriend queer people without treating friendship as a theological concession. A positive alternative must be observed before it is imitated.

Third, stop outsourcing formation to one annual respectful relationships session. Schools need those programs and churches should support them. The independent evaluation of The Man Cave found that one-off work begins an important conversation but is less likely to change behaviour without repeated sessions, practical tools and supportive adults (Elliott et al., 2022). The algorithm works daily. Your church needs regular, age-appropriate conversations about sex, consent, power, pornography, bodies, money and disappointment, led by people trained to do the work safely.

Fourth, use expertise already available. eSafety has resources for young men, families, educators and youth-serving organisations (eSafety Commissioner, 2026a). Jesuit Social Services publishes research and practical tools for discussing rigid masculinity (Jesuit Social Services, 2024). The Man Cave has experience with school-based programs and emerging adolescent data (The Man Cave, n.d.). Your congregation does not need to invent a curriculum from instinct or assume a visiting speaker substitutes for a sustained safeguarding and formation plan.

Fifth, support structural reform. Since 10 December 2025, major platforms have been required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts. That protection matters. It does not answer what happens when a young person turns 16, and eSafety reported continuing compliance concerns in the first months of operation (eSafety Commissioner, 2026b). The Australian Government’s proposed Digital Duty of Care would require online services to manage foreseeable harms in their systems, including algorithmic recommendations (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts, 2026). On 2 September 2026, Treasurer Jim Chalmers strongly criticised what algorithms feed children but stopped short of endorsing the Contos opt-in proposal. Labor was considering an opt-out requirement (Busch, 2026). Political concern has widened. The regulatory model remains unsettled.

An opt-in model for personalised feeds deserves serious consideration. That is my opinion, based on a governance principle. A system carrying foreseeable harm should not make the riskier setting the silent default. European experience shows why the detail matters. The EU requires very large platforms to offer an alternative to profiling-based recommendations. Dutch litigation and formal Irish investigations followed claims that Meta made the alternative hard to access or failed to preserve the user’s choice (Coimisiún na Meán, 2026; DSA Observatory, 2026). Meaningful consent requires an available chronological or follower-only feed, a choice that stays in effect, independent research access and proof of compliance. A nominal switch designed to be abandoned is not consent.

Sixth, protect girls, women and LGBTIQA+ people without describing boys as an approaching threat. Safety and compassion are not rival priorities. The church’s task is to refuse the script in which one group must be humiliated for another to belong.

A better offer

The algorithm’s advantage is not that its story is true. Its advantage is that it arrives early, repeats itself and knows which wound to touch.

The church will not out-personalise a recommender system. It does what the system does not. It knows a boy without reducing him to a behavioural profile. It tells the truth without needing his continued attention. It remains when he is ashamed. It places him among women and men whose lives make domination look small. It gives him work worth doing for someone other than himself.

That is discipleship too.

If you want boys to hear Jesus say ‘not so among you’, your church will have to become the kind of community in which another way of being a man is practised often enough to be believed.

For churches with schools, that responsibility does not stop at the church door. Part two, Church Schools and the Culture They Form, follows it into the boardroom.

Scripture quotation marked NRSVue is from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, copyright 2021 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All other biblical language is paraphrase, with references supplied for checking.

Sources

References

Busch, B. (2026, September 2). Chalmers backs assault on big tech as Contos sounds alarm on manosphere. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/chalmers-backs-assault-on-big-tech-as-contos-sounds-alarm-on-sexual-violence-20260902-p60tnl.html

Coimisiún na Meán. (2026, May 5). Two investigations commenced into Meta, in respect of Facebook and Instagram. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.cnam.ie/two-investigations-commenced-into-meta-in-respect-of-facebook-instagram/

Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts. (2026, May 26). A digital duty of care for Australia. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/digital-duty-care-australia-developing-duty-care-framework-online-services-used-australians

DSA Observatory. (2026, July 30). Ineffective by design: Bits of Freedom vs Meta. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://dsa-observatory.eu/2026/07/30/ineffective-by-design-bits-of-freedom-vs-meta-at-the-forefront-of-enforcing-user-control-for-recommender-systems-under-the-dsa/

Elliott, K., Roberts, S., Ralph, B., Stewart, R., Walker, J., & O’Brien, K. (2022). Evaluating programs aimed at gender transformative work with men and boys: A multi-cohort, cross-sector investigation. Monash University and VicHealth. https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/20221012_Monash_GenderTransformativeWork.pdf

eSafety Commissioner. (2026a, May 25). Recommender systems and algorithms: Position statement. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.esafety.gov.au/industry/tech-trends-and-challenges/recommender-systems-and-algorithms

eSafety Commissioner. (2026b, April 1). Social media ‘ban’ or delay FAQ. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs

Ging, D., Baker, C., & Brandt Andreasen, M. (2024). Recommending toxicity: The role of algorithmic recommender functions on YouTube Shorts and TikTok in promoting male supremacist influencers. DCU Anti-Bullying Centre, Dublin City University. https://doras.dcu.ie/31681/1/DCU_Recommending_Toxicity_Summary_Report_FV%2812%29.pdf

Jesuit Social Services. (2024). The Man Box 2024: Re-examining what it means to be a man in Australia. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://jss.org.au/programs/research/the-man-box/

Moriarty, G., Opozda, M., & Datnow-Jamieson, D. (2026). Rigid masculine norms and adolescent help-seeking: Findings from a national school-based program in Australia. Population Medicine, 8(Supplement 1), A2236. https://www.populationmedicine.eu/Author-ged-moriarty/365807

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. (2021). National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-Revised-Standard-Version-Updated-Edition-NRSVue-Bible/

Powell, R., & Pepper, M. (2021). National Anglican Family Violence Research Report: Top line results. NCLS Research. https://anglican.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NAFVP-Top-Line-Results-Report-NCLS-Research.pdf

The Man Cave. (n.d.). Preventative mental health programs for teenage boys. Retrieved 2 September 2026, from https://themancave.life/