Misogyny is not innate but learned behaviour and increasingly boys and young men are learning how to hate from social media.

Perhaps we’ve all known this for some time and I’ve certainly been drawing attention to a toxic prejudice against women in the wake of every new, incel-inspired school shooting in America, or mass murder in this country – from Axel Rudakubana in Southport and the triple killer Kyle Clifford in Hertfordshire, to the recently convicted Nicholas Prosper in Luton who, after murdering his mother and siblings, intended to kill pupils at his former primary school. These killers follow a cultural script which has been handed down to them from previous shooters and murderers, many of whom left records – “manifestos” – about their motivation to kill, and over time this script has become increasingly amplified and justified by social media influencers.

These murderous boys and young men don’t just emerge as killers out of the blue. They’re created by what they read online in the anonymity of their bedrooms, guided by algorithms that take them down ever more extreme rabbit holes. When they resurface, blinking into their lived reality, they seem convinced that the world is against them – in my experience, they’re often grievance collectors – and that girls and women are their enemy.

Read more by David Wilson

As I say, we’ve probably all known this for some time, but it took Netflix’s Adolescence to start a public conversation about what is happening to young men like the character Jamie Miller in the series and begin........

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