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24th March 2025
11:10am GMT
The gripping four-part drama – which sees each episode shot in one continuous take – stars Stephen Graham as Eddie, a husband and father whose world is rocked when his 13-year-old son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), is arrested for the murder of a classmate.
In particular, the show looks at the negative impact social media can have on teenage boys, through Andrew Tate-style influencers and ideas such as the manosphere and incel culture.
The series has received critical acclaim and shot to the top of Netflix's most watched charts in both the UK and the US.
However, parts of the right right have decided to shift the discourse away from the vital conversation around boys and the content they are exposed to online, and instead stoked culture war narratives around race.
Unsurprisingly, one of those who has decided to amplify these toxic narratives on social media is Elon Musk.
He spread inflammatory misinformation about the series by responding to a post on his social media platform X which questioned why the killer in Adolescence was a white boy.
The user, called Ian Miles Cheong, claimed the series had been created in the wake of the Southport stabbings and was based on Axel Rudakubana's horrific crime.
This is patently false as the show was in production before the attacks. Adolescence was filmed over six months between March and September, with Rudakubana's attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class taking place in July.
Spreading the fake news, Cheong questioned why the show's creators had "swapped the actual killer from a black man/migrant to a white boy."
Replying to the post, Musk simply wrote: "Wow."
Chong's post has been viewed almost 5 million times, a number certainly inflated thanks to Musk's reply, who has 220 million followers.
Many were quick to point out that Adolescence was in no way based on the Southport attacks, blasting both Musk and Cheong for spreading this inflammatory misinformation.
Several said the fact posts like this could gain such traction was a prime example of how hellish Twitter had become under Musk's ownership, with one user writing: "The amount of viral nonsense that is posted as news on this app, often amplified by Elon Musk, is mind-boggling."
Adolescence was co-created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and the pair have spoken openly about their inspiration behind the series.
Appearing on BBC Breakfast last week, Thorne said: “This is a show about a kid who does the wrong thing and causes great harm. To understand him, we have to understand the pressures upon him.
“Jamie has been polluted by ideas that he’s heard online, that make sense to him, that have a logic that’s attractive to him, that answer the questions as to his loneliness and isolation and lead him to make some very bad choices.
“We have to understand the things he’s been consuming and that means especially looking at the internet, the manosphere and incel culture.”
Graham, who co-wrote the series along with starring in it, said he had been inspired to create the drama after reading about two separate stories of boys stabbing girls to death.
He said: “I read an article in the paper about a young boy who’d killed a young girl and a three weeks later I was watching the news and there was a story of a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl to death.
“It really hurt my heart, I just thought, ‘what’s going on in society where this kind of thing is becoming a regular occurrence?’
“I just couldn’t fathom it. So I wanted to really have a look and try and shine a light on this particular thing.”
