The Business of the Manosphere | Who Profits from Male Grievance?

30/09/2026 - From 19h30 to 21h30 - Public

Why are so many young men being drawn into online communities built around loneliness, grievance and masculinity?
In this talk, Kristina Wilfore will explore the findings of The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online, a new investigation by Reset Tech and Equimundo. She will examine how male loneliness and insecurity are not simply social problems, but can be deliberately amplified, packaged and monetised by online influencers and other actors.
The discussion will look at the business models behind the so-called “manosphere”, how platforms help distribute these messages, and how young men are sold promises of belonging, wealth and status.
Rather than viewing young men only as a problem to be solved, the report asks a different question: who profits from their vulnerability?

About the speaker

Kristina Wilfore has worked on the ground in more than 30 countries, helping build the movements that hold power to account. She is an international democracy strategist who has spent three decades on the front lines of some of the world’s most consequential political battles: Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Middle East, Brazil and the United States, where coordinated information operations translate directly into political violence, and in East Africa, where she exposed social media manipulation campaigns undermining fundamental rights and freedoms.

As Director of Global Projects and Innovation at Reset Tech, Kristina leads global initiatives at the intersection of election integrity, gendered information warfare, and tech accountability.  In Europe, that work includes partnering with women’s parliamentary caucuses, EU regulators  and digital activists to turn analysis into action. Her view is that real impact arrives when elected women champion the regulatory frameworks that already exist with enough force and precision to shift the incentives, rather than focusing energy on documenting online failures.

As co-founder of #ShePersisted, she was at the vanguard of reframing digital attacks on women in public life not as isolated incidents of online harassment but as coordinated threats to democratic participation and national security. Her assessment of the field is blunt: it has spent too long analyzing the problem and not long enough fighting back. She has trained hundreds of women running for office across dozens of countries and authored practical digital toolkits used by campaigns and civil society organizations.

Her frontline analysis of democracy and technology has been featured by The New York Times, Politico, the BBC, Wired Magazine, Folha de S. Paulo, Brookings, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others.

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