Beyond Algorithmic Romance: Challenging the Digital Media Narratives on Love and Violence

by Sherifa Awudu
Guest Op-ed.

There has been a burst of short drama reels within our social media spaces in recent times.  Apps like Drama Shorts, Kalos TV, Drama box, Reel Shorts are all over Instagram, facebook and tiktok and there is no escaping them due to the heavy promotion. Sometimes the stories have such an interesting hook, you follow them and then voila, you are asked to pay to continue. But that is not the focus of this post. Instead, it’s the inherent narratives many of these reels promote that are problematic.

The reels start the same way every time: a man storms into a room, a woman flinches, and before a word is said, he grabs her wrist. The camera zooms in on his face, jaw tense, eyes burning  and the caption flashes cliche titles like: “Professor’s Pet” “Hired for Pleasure” etc. 

Scroll again, and it’s another couple. She’s crying, he slaps her, the music swells, and somehow the comment section reads: “This is what real love looks like,  messy but deep.” And in some instances it’s the payback for another abuse “she was my sister and my whole world, how dare you hit her”. 

I didn’t think much of it at first. These were just short videos on apps like Reel Shorts, Kalos Tv, Drama Box, and others  bite-sized “stories” designed to fill the gaps between meetings, meals, or metro rides. But the more I watched, the clearer the pattern became. These weren’t isolated stories. They were scripts and narratives  – repeating, evolving, spreading. Dehumanizing stories where violence was not the climax of abuse, but the expression of affection.

And that’s when it hit me: we are being taught, through algorithms, carefully crafted narratives and aesthetics, that pain is passion and domination is desire. We can also draw examples from simple things like filters or sounds and how content creators use them across Tiktok and Instagram. 

Remember when Tiktok had a filter of a battered face which was used for funny content? Seeing captions like 

• Leave him? No way “using money to wipe non-existent tears)
• I’d rather cry in a bugatti than in public transport among others. 

YEEEAHHHH. I am still very angry about that trend.

The Algorithm’s Favorite Emotion: Control

Short video platforms thrive on emotion. The algorithm doesn’t care what you feel, only that you feel something strongly enough to stop scrolling. Anger, lust, jealousy, shock are the currencies of attention.

This means that stories showing men asserting control, manipulation tactics from both men and women, women breaking down and being ridiculously patient, or couples caught in high-stakes tension tend to perform extremely well. They’re emotionally charged, visually dramatic, and easy to reproduce.

But this is also what makes them dangerous. When violence and coercion are framed as entertainment, they become normalized expressions of love. When users watch them repeatedly, they don’t just consume content,  they absorb specific “ways of being” and ideology.  However, this is the worrying part: young people and adolescents are consuming such content daily and it’s time we ask – to what extent will this type of media consumption influence their sexual and gendered wellbeing. 

This is what scholars call technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), a form of harm not always direct or personal, but also structural and cultural. It’s the slow conditioning that happens when technology, in this case social media algorithms, itself becomes a medium for reinforcing harmful gender power dynamics.

When Algorithms Write Love Stories

What makes this particularly insidious is that these narratives often masquerade as modern romance. They package coercion as care:

• “He hit her because he couldn’t control his love or jealousy.”
• “She stayed because she saw the good in him/ stayed because she is patient”
• “Real love is painful, that’s how you know it’s real.”

These aren’t just stories; they are digital templates of intimacy, shaping what audiences, especially young viewers come to expect from intimate relationships. They quietly rewrite the grammar of love itself. 

In this algorithm-driven world, the “ideal” man is financially and emotionally possessive and passionate to the point of aggression, while the “ideal” woman is patient, redemptive, and endlessly forgiving. These aren’t random tropes; they echo centuries-old patriarchal scripts now automated and amplified by the algorithm.

Beyond the Screen: Why It Matters

Some might argue that “it’s just fiction,” but fiction has always been one of the most powerful ways societies teach emotion. 

From music to movies, when coercion is romanticized thousands of times a day and on scale, it doesn’t just stay on the screen. It seeps into the social fabric, shaping how people interpret love, conflict, and consent.

Over time, we begin to mistake intensity for intimacy and control for protection. And when real-life violence occurs, it doesn’t look as shocking anymore because we’ve seen it before, online, dressed up as devotion.

This is how Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence operates in its most subtle form: not just through direct digital abuse, but through the ecosystems of meaning that teach us to empathize with perpetrators and silence victims.

Reclaiming Digital Love Languages

Where are we heading ?

Every year we make commitments during 16 Days of Activism, as we also did this year, against Gender Based Violence; yes we have made significant progress but we still have a lot of work to do. This year’s theme was Unite to End Digital Violence against All Women and Girls and it’s essential that we amplify our intersectional (digital) media approaches to interrogate not only the content of such stories but also the systems that sustain their visibility. As long as attention remains the currency of digital culture, violence will continue to masquerade as love, unless we learn to read against the algorithm 

It’s time we start reading these stories critically, not just as entertainment, but as part of a broader cultural pedagogy. We must ask:
Who gets to define love? Who profits from its pain? And what do we lose when our screens start teaching us that violence and tenderness can coexist?

The good news is that the same technology that spreads these harmful scripts can also be used to challenge them. Independent creators, feminist storytellers, and digital activists are reclaiming the narrative(s), crafting stories that center respect, consent, and care without sacrificing emotion or drama. If the algorithm has learned to reward violence, maybe it can also be re-trained to reward empathy and change the narratives. But that starts with us and with how we watch, share, and question what we see.

Because love should never have to hurt to feel real. And technology should never be an accomplice in teaching us otherwise. 

Sherifa Awudu is an SRHR expert and researcher whose work focuses on youth, digital media, and reproductive justice. She studies how language and digital platforms shape gendered discourses around abortion, stigma, and safety, with a particular interest in feminist approaches to designing safer online spaces for conversations about sexual and reproductive health and rights.