Knowledge Governance in the Post-truth Era: The Manosphere as a Competing Knowledge Regime

Abstract

In the post-truth era, organisations face a critical vulnerability that we frame under epistemic permeability, a process through which external, radicalised digital regimes infiltrate organisational sensemaking and the workplace. These alternative truths, specifically those originating in the manosphere, challenge the foundations of institutional expertise and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion frameworks. While traditional knowledge management focuses on internal flows, it often remains epistemically blind to the sophisticated architectures of digital subcultures that compete for authority in the minds of the employees. This study employs a netnographic analysis of the French manosphere on mainstream social media platforms Instagram and TikTok to explore the mechanisms through which ideological claims acquire their authority. Our preliminary findings reveal that these regimes are built through four interconnected mechanisms: the construction of experiential authority via embodied proof, the use of intellectual eloquence and the hijacking of academic rhetoric to provide a facade of analytical rigour, the framing of gender hierarchy as an objective biological fact, and the strategic penetration of organisational vocabularies using corporate palatable concepts. By mapping how these sanitised narratives migrate from the digital fringe into the workplace, we argue that organisations must move beyond conventional codification and compliance. Instead, they should develop resilient governance models centred on epistemic literacy and the critical evaluation of contested truths to safeguard institutional integrity.