AMNA NAWAZ: We turn now to growing concerns around the proliferation of misogyny online and its migration into real-world interactions, especially those involving young men.

John Yang has this story about a Detroit teenager's experience and the broader implications of this trend.

JOHN YANG: Like many his age, Bryan Campbell says he grew up an iPad kid, playing a lot of video games.

BRYAN CAMPBELL, Teenager: You're about to lose anyway.

It don't matter.

JOHN YANG: And when the COVID pandemic forced schools to shift to remote learning when he was 12, his primary connection with friends was online.

BRYAN CAMPBELL: I would spend all my time on the Internet.

Either I'm playing a video game or on TikTok or both, "Fortnite," "NBA 2K."

If me and my friends get bored playing it for 10 hours, then we scroll on TikTok, and send each other videos.

And then we'd get back to playing the game.

JOHN YANG: Eventually, content with a specific perspective started showing up on Campbell's feeds.

MAN: It is so easy to become a top-tier male in this world today, because the competition is so ridiculously low.

BRYAN CAMPBELL: Topics masquerading as informational kind of male improvement.

I think a lot of these people have lived more life.

They're rich.

They're -- nice car, all that, like what society says is the ideal for a young man.

JOHN YANG: The message appealed to Campbell.

And the more he engaged with it, the more he saw.

Campbell had found himself in the heart of what's known as the manosphere.

The term broadly refers to online communities that create and share content aimed at men and boys.

But there's growing concern about the ideas behind that content, misogynistic, often conspiratorial beliefs about gender roles and masculinity.

And thanks to a handful of key influencers, the manosphere's reach has exploded.

In an attempt to quantify that growth, researchers in Dublin set up accounts on multiple social media apps posing as teenage boys.

Last year, they reported that, in less than half-an-hour, every one of the accounts was fed manosphere content, whether they sought it out or not.

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS, American University: In the post MeToo movement, we have seen this surge of online misogyny in particular.

JOHN YANG: Cynthia Miller-Idriss is the founder of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

Her book "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism" will be published in the fall.

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS: They land on an influencer who's offering them often very tangible and real help that makes a difference, right, like get eight hours of sleep and drink water and get to the gym, and they package that with scapegoating of women or treatment of women or an idea of success as being dominant.

And so your life is improving while you're starting to believe this other stuff.

MAN: Women sell purity.

Men sell success.

MAN: This is seen as a more dominant position.

MAN: A woman wants sex more than the guy does.

MAN: The average woman will always cheat more than the average man.

JOHN YANG: That's the sort of content Campbell was seeing.

Soon, he was echoing those ideas.

BRYAN CAMPBELL: Like women want to control us, and us as young men, we have to not be at the whim of women and stuff.

I didn't really know what I was talking about, but it sounded good.

JOHN YANG: Campbell's dad, Al, and his older brother, Brandon, who had fallen down similar rabbit holes when he was younger, noticed a change.

BRANDON CAMPBELL, Brother of Bryan Campbell: He started mentioning a lot of things typical of someone who believes that the world is against them or you think that, if you are not in, I will in quotes, "superior," then something's wrong.

He was kind of taking on opinions that didn't sound like his own.

They were opinions that I myself once had because I had gained them from someone else.

JOHN YANG: While Bryan was seeing this material, were you aware of it?

AL CAMPBELL, Father of Bryan Campbell: I guess I didn't really pick up one at first.

Over time, he said a few things that gets a little concerning.

And like, hey, my wife's going to clean up after me, being the alpha male and the this and the that and the type of guy that's the strongest, the baddest, and everybody needs to bow down and respect you.

But then you don't have to respect anybody else.

LISA DAMOUR, Author, "The Emotional Lives of Teenagers": When it comes to behavior like this, there's really no excuse for it, but there may be an explanation for it.

JOHN YANG: Psychologist and author Lisa Damour specializes in adolescent development.

LISA DAMOUR: It's helpful to think about 12-year-old boys in broader context.

Girls hit puberty before boys do.

So what this means is that for seventh grade boys in general, the girls are often beating them at recess and then they come into the classroom and the girls are often beating them in school.

So if you are a 12- or 13-year-old boy and you have had a very rough day at school, where a girl outran you at recess and then had all the right answers when you didn't understand what was happening in class, and you come home feeling pretty small, and you hop online and there is somebody telling you, listen, guys are actually great and the thing that's holding us back are girls, that is pretty compelling.

ACTOR: Jamie, I want you to listen carefully.

JOHN YANG: Online radicalization in the manosphere are at the center of the Emmy-nominated Netflix miniseries "Adolescence," the platform's most watched show in the first half of the year with 145 million views.

It's a fictional account of how these influences lead a teenage boy to murder a female classmate.

ACTOR: It's a call to action by the manosphere; 80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men.

You must trick them because you will never get them in a normal way.

JOHN YANG: In real life, there's a growing number of examples of manosphere culture affecting interactions between boys and girls.

GIRL: It's like little things like, oh, you should be back in the kitchen.

And even though it's a joke, some people take it really far.

GIRL: There are games that I have stopped playing because every single time I joined, I'd receive a rape threat.

GIRL: Me and my former roommate were chased on campus by two different men, saying that they were going to have a lot of fun with us that night.

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS: Those kinds of things are -- have migrated from online worlds into real life, sometimes in ways that boys are just trying to be provocative, sometimes in ways that are really dangerous stepping-stones on the way to more harmful and violent content and behaviors.

JOHN YANG: Experts say the key to combating the spread of these ideas and preventing their worst effects is to engage with young men.

LISA DAMOUR: Don't start with a lecture.

Start instead with a question.

Ask, have you seen this?

What is it like to see it?

What do you think adults don't know about this that we should probably know?

And how can I be helpful?

JOHN YANG: That's what happened to Bryan Campbell in Detroit.

Around Thanksgiving 2020, his older brother, home from college, sat him down for a long conversation.

BRANDON CAMPBELL: So I wanted him to have a more, I guess, reflective idea of how he was engaging with others, how he viewed people and how he interacted with them, less as ideas or groups of people, but as individuals.

JOHN YANG: Campbell says that talk helped pull him out of the manosphere.

He still sees online videos pushing misogynistic views, but he says he's able to tune them out and click not interested.

BRYAN CAMPBELL: A lot of it was like reminding myself about people in my life, like my grandma, my mom, like remembering that there are real-life women in my life that I respect a lot of and that there's more to it than what the Internet shows.

JOHN YANG: This fall, Campbell will be a senior in high school.

His summer is filled with internships and other programs.

Now, when he hears friends make misogynistic comments, he tries to speak up.

"What I won't do," he says, "is be complicit."

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm John Yang in Detroit.