Helping Young Men Find Healthy Forms of Belonging

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In a landmark legal settlement last month, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle state lawsuits alleging that its platforms drive anxiety, depression and suicide among children. However, the settlement will do little to address how social media is negatively impacting  an entire generation of young men.

“Most people have no idea how quickly Instagram, YouTube and Discord infect college-age men with harmful, violent messages,” said University of California Santa Barbara social worker Sven Rundman, who has dedicated his career to supporting male students. “In our current political and economic environment, young men are highly vulnerable to these messages. And that has huge implications for our entire society.”

Rundman’s campus-level perspective is backed by research by the nonprofit Equimundo, which promotes healthy forms of masculinity and fatherhood. “Economic insecurity, isolation, and harmful norms are driving a dangerous mix of despair and grievance,” according to Equimundo’s most recent State of American Men report. A multibillion-dollar social media industry then exploits these anxieties for profit.

Fortunately, Rundman has seen that thoughtfully designed efforts can compete with exploitive ones for hearts and minds. For example, for six years Rundman has hosted and guided in-person groups that gently model a healthier version of masculinity than the ones that toxic influencers project. “Once they feel part of an in-person community, it’s easy to see that everything online is fake,” said UCSB’s Rundman. “The conversations get very real and very honest. It’s like barriers and walls melt.”

Rundman shared the story of a student from a low-income background who had been spending many hours in online spaces before managing to break out. “I know those meetings had a profound effect on him,” Rundman explained. “In one group session, he shared with us that he intervened when he saw two guys at a bar targeting an intoxicated woman. He confronted the two guys and called an Uber for the woman. He credited his confidence to coming to our meetings.”

Inviting, Not Indicting

To provoke just this kind of behavior change, DC-based Equimundo partnered with the national nonprofit Futures Without Violence to create LinkUp Lab. LinkUp Lab’s core strategy is to “invite, not indict.” In other words, it does not engage in shaming, which has been shown to be counterproductive. Instead, it embraces young men and helps them find healthier forms of connection and belonging.

In December 2025, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation selected LinkUp Lab as one of nine “civic engagement” grantees. According to Senior Program Officer Vanessa Tucker, “We made these grants to learn from a set of organizations that are supporting young people to be agents in their own civic lives. I am excited about LinkUp Lab, because they are already having an impact in turning online incentives on their head to produce better civic outcomes.”

Five Innovations

• LinkUp Lab is changing incentives through five distinct but complementary innovations. Its first innovation, known as Diverting Hate, worked with UCSB’s Rundman to create a series of online ads to attract male college students to in-person campus events, therapy and peer-led communities. The ads proved to be highly effective, generating 240,000 impressions and 1,400 clicks. The promise of free Chipotle meals helped drive strong turnout for in-person meetings and hikes. Thanks to the quality of the guided conversations, post-program surveys confirmed that the sessions achieved their intended outcomes. For example, the vast majority of participants reported that the events “affirmed that strength can include listening, curiosity and care for others.”

• LinkUp Lab’s second innovation is called Project Moonlight. It has recruited Discord moderators who reach more than 22 million community members. It trains these moderators to provide an immediate response to any participant who makes a bid—positive or negative—for connection. To date, Project Moonlight has analyzed more than 130,000 moderator interventions across 10 Discord communities and these interventions were highly effective at producing at least one measurable behavioral shift within four weeks. For example, in one 20,000-member collegiate e-sports community, toxicity declined from 6.9 percent to 3.7 percent after moderators created new spaces and rituals for human connection.

• LinkUp Lab’s third innovation is a project with Harmony Labs. It focuses on understanding different groups of men and the messages that will be effective with each group. “There is no single message, or intervention, that will reach all men,” LinkUp Lab’s Caroline Hayes shared. “Harmony Labs is giving us, and the broader field, a more precise foundation for designing interventions around the motivations, aspirations, and media habits of specific audiences rather than relying on a generic ‘young men’ strategy.”

• In August, Harmony Lab released its initial research findings, based on large-scale field tests and a randomized controlled media-response trial involving 13,000 participants. Based on a detailed analysis of the media narratives that are particularly resonant for each of five audience segments, Harmony Lab presented guidelines for content creators who want to reach young men with positive messages. The top-line conclusions included: Don’t overly critique masculinity. Do feature men just being men. Don’t go for solo rants and reactions. Do show two+ dudes doing stuff. Do place the viewer inside the action. Don’t be staid, static, sealed off.

• LinkUp Lab’s fourth innovation, AMAZE, is developing content that incorporates all the learnings above. AMAZE creates videos for teenage boys as well as their parents and teachers. The videos cover topics such as looksmaxxing, emotional regulation, AI deepfakes, male loneliness and dating. They have generated nearly 500,000 views across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. And after watching the videos, 175,000 viewers sought additional information, such as briefs that go deeper on the topic. “We’re learning that we don’t need to wait for young people to enter a classroom or a prevention program,” Hayes said. “By designing content to answer the questions boys are already asking—and placing that content in the digital channels they’re using—we can compete for their attention at the moment curiosity arises.”

• LinkUp Lab’s fifth innovation, EndTAB (End Technology-Enabled Abuse), created a coding bootcamp for advocates who want to incorporate healthier values into the technologies they’re building. “Thanks to AI, people working on gender equality, violence prevention and youth well-being can become technology builders—rather than simply trying to respond to technology after it’s built,” said Hayes. “We’re now helping participants with little or no coding background move from the blank page to working prototypes in roughly two weeks.” Participants in the first bootcamp gave it a satisfaction score of greater than four out of five on each of its core elements.

LinkUp Lab hopes the whole of its work will add up to more than just the sum of its five innovations. Its end goal is to help millions of young men find healthier spaces online and stronger connections in their lives. “At a moment when many young men report deep distrust in institutions and disengagement from civic life, their digital environments can either reinforce division or create new pathways toward connection, agency and participation,” said Hayes.

There is no question that toxic social media exerts a powerful gravitational pull for many young men. But LinkUp Lab is proving that the positive messages, too, can be highly influential when they’re authentic, targeted with precision, delivered in the right spaces and carried by  the right messengers. A lot rides on getting this work right, both for the well-being of young men and for the health of our democracy.

In 2025, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation launched a two-year learning portfolio focused on increasing civic education and engagement for young people. The portfolio’s nine nonprofits span diverse geographies and strategies — from startups to century-old institutions. Through site visits, data collection and convenings, the foundation will discover what approaches work best, positioning a potential future funding strategy designed to encourage young people to become highly engaged citizens.