Stephen McDermott

“MEN WHO GET girls at parties – what’s your secret?”

According to the social media ad where this question presented itself to me, the answer is an edible gummy that can help calm a person’s nerves and give them “effortless confidence” in 30 minutes.

This isn’t something I searched for, but something Facebook decided I should be thinking about.

In the past couple of weeks, Meta has started feeding me a range of these and similar ads – on a burner Facebook account I use for work – which promote apps and products that offer to help men ‘hack’ dating.

The ads initially appeared in my feed, sporadically, alongside other sponsored posts promoting gambling companies and clothes shops, because the people who bought them paid Meta to target me as a 30-something-year-old man.

Meta’s algorithm has built a version of me and decides what that version of me needs daily.

Once I clicked into the ads to find out more about the weird products and services I was seeing, Meta took that as a sign that I really wanted help with women and started inundating me with even more possibilities.

I saw ads for a therapy-like service which suggested that romantic rejection can be reversed through a system of psychological triggers and carefully timed messages.

Another ad promoted an AI assistant that offered to generate tailored messages for “any girl you text” and to help users figure out “what to say in any situation” when talking to women.

Those ads also claimed the app can help men unlock a “psychological technique taken from erotic literature” that triggers specific responses in a woman’s brain to “make her obsessed”.

There were also ads that promoted a personal motivation programme that claimed it could help men win back their ex-girlfriends, with the questionable advice: “Break her ego to make her miss you”.

Individually, they all seemed like fringe products; taken together, they showed me the market that exists in telling men how they should approach relationships.

The sponsored posts I saw promoted a trove of different services, but they had many similar features, including a reliance on pseudoscientific language, the inclusion of seemingly fake testimonies, and the use of AI slop in their copy and images.

They used terms like “dopamine withdrawal”, “emotional triggers” and “behavioural loops” to give the impression they are based on something other than a confidence trick.

The language itself was pretty consistent, as if the advertisers had learned that the combination of vaguely scientific terms with male vulnerability was especially effective at holding attention. 

Ultimately, the ads had the same underlying message: if a man can understand the mechanisms of social interactions, he can hack into people’s brains and subtly control the outcome of any situations – especially those involving women.

It’s a way of thinking about relationships that is itself algorithmic.

It also reflects a broader split in how different people experience the online world because of the profiling nature of social media algorithms.

The products were fed to me on a male version of the internet that is different to the version seen by women, who may not even know such products exist because they’re not being pushed to them.

The ads are not overtly ideological on the surface, but on the internet in 2026, it’s impossible to separate them from the psychology that underpins the Manosphere – a loose network of online male communities built around promoting traditional male values, anti-feminism and misogyny.

By gamifying the idea of dating, they present relationships as things that can be optimised and controlled, and women as robots whose behaviour can be programmed.

They also suggest that human interaction is a game, and to know this and figure out how to play it is what that separates Alpha males from Beta males.

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Of course, this is deeply dehumanising – both for the people who buy into this stuff and those on whom they want to try it out.

Like the influencers of the Manosphere, the products push the underlying idea that there are quick solutions to problems that are more deep-seated.

But those quick solutions, including things like tailored AI-generated responses to text messages or hacks to “make any woman obsessed”, suggest that people can outsource basic human interactions which results in the degradation of traits as fundamental as communication and empathy.

It’s therefore ironic that the ads appear on a platform that claims its mission is to connect people, because they tap into the familiar fears – rejection, anxiety, loneliness – of men who are looking for just that.

It is a clear example of emotional vulnerability being exploited for a commercial opportunity, where ideas similar to those promoted in the Manosphere are used as a method of reaching consumers.

The framing of the ads overlaps with ideas that have circulated for years in the Manosphere, where relationships are presented as competitive and strategic.

What’s new is how social media and artificial intelligence have enabled toxic behaviour to be more directly commodified and repackaged into something that looks more mainstream and acceptable.

There are obviously men who believe in the type of social engineering that the products promote, who will presumably part with their money for such products and services.

But there are also others for whom the sponsored posts may serve as a more subtle introduction to the Manosphere.

And as long as those ideas are being delivered, unprompted, into people’s feeds on one of the largest social media platforms in the world, Meta will continue to make money from them.