While the headlines have been dominated by conversations about young men being radicalised online or falling down incel pipelines, a network of disinformation aimed at misleading young women has been bubbling away under the surface – the so-called ‘womanosphere’.

Like the better-known ‘manosphere’, the womansphere consists of a network of right-wing influencers, podcasts, YouTube channels and private forums, speaking directly to young women. “While the women behind [the womansphere] all have different styles and tactics, they are mostly aligned in their desire to return to a gender-essentialist worldview: women as submissive homemakers, men as strong providers,” writes Anna Silman, who is generally credited with coining the term.

You’ve probably seen womanosphere content on your timelines: from tradwives, to Skinnytok, and more recently, anti-immigrant rhetoric claiming that women need to be protected from people coming to the UK to seek asylum. However, as this content continues to rise, some content creators are taking to social media to fight fire with fire.

“I think I just got quite tired of being in my own echo chamber,” says Julia Westrup (@haveyouseenmybaguette on TikTok), a 20-year-old actor and student. When she first created her account, it wasn’t political at all. Mostly, she’d share trending sounds and memes. But in the last few months, the tone of her content has shifted.

Now, she focuses on pushing back against womanosphere talking points. “I think it can be exhausting having the same conversations with people who completely disagree with you. It’s weirdly frustrating because it’s like, well, where do we go from here?” Having been raised in a progressive family in London, Julia wanted to find a way to challenge some of the views she was hearing more and more since moving out of the city to study.

“It started with a feeling of frustration. I hope to be someone who can articulate what many people in my generation are feeling,” she says, adding, “I think the world my generation is set to inherit feels almost unlivable at the rate things seem to be going environmentally and geopolitically. It feels really, really uncertain, and it feels very hard [for us] to get a word in, especially in very populist [political] environments.” TikTok has given her a way to try to feel heard as a young person who feels ignored or spoken over.

“The Reform Party only has four seats in the chamber; they’re just really, really loud. And I think we should just be louder.”

Louisa Toxvaerd Munch (@louisamuch on TikTok) has a similar goal. Frustrated by both the unequal access to academia she experienced as a student from a working-class background, and the amount of anti-intellectual “I’m just a girl” content being aimed at women online, Louisa began to share insights and even reading syllabi from her Critical Theory PhD.

“I’m such a massive fan of Julia Fox and EmRata. These women, who have been portrayed in the media as – and who have also benefited from patriarchal objectification – they have now moved into this space of saying ‘we want to discuss these political issues, want to discuss cultural issues, give us space to do that.’ So, there is this real hunger that people want to hear from female voices, and they do want to have more academic and intellectual conversations.”