Attitudes towards gender equality are becoming increasingly polarized in many societies, especially among young people. Young women are becoming increasingly feminist in their political views, whereas young men are becoming increasingly misogynistic. An important potential cause of such polarization relates to the elite cues they receive from social media influencers. Previous research has stressed the role of intergroup threat, showing that so called manfluencers who present a world view where women and feminism constitute a threat to masculine identity influence young men’s attitudes toward gender equality. However, little is known about what motivates young women to become increasingly feminist in their views. This paper focuses on the role of social media influencers in driving polarization on gender equality. We focus specifically on the Swedish case, which has long been described as being highly gender equal, but where we are currently observing a gender backlash with young men increasingly holding misogynistic attitudes. We show, in a survey experiment that both young women and young men are influenced by social media influencer content. Specifically, we exposed young women and men to the same fictive social media content, describing a situation where women’s status in society is improving. The results show that young women perceive feminist messages as empowering, resulting in stronger support for feminism, while young men perceive the same messages as threatening, resulting in more misogynist attitudes. Hence, our results support the idea that influencers and their social media content on gender relations has important consequences for polarization in society.