Women are a man’s property, can’t drive, and belong in the home, according to Andrew Tate. According to films shared online, he dates women in their 18s and 19s so that he may “make an impression” on them and believes that rape victims must “carry responsibility” for their assaults.In other videos, the British-American kickboxer, who poses with fast vehicles, pistols, and cigars, boasts about beating and choking women, destroying their possessions, and preventing them from leaving the house.
“Bang the machete in her face, boom in her ears, and grab her by the neck. In one video, he acts out how he would attack a lady if she accused him of cheating and screams, “Shut up bitch. He recounts tossing a woman’s belongings out the window in another. In a third, he refers to an ex-girlfriend who accused him of beating her as a “stupid hoe” despite the fact that he disputes the charge.
Domestic violence charity have characterised Andrew Tate’s opinions as extreme misogyny, capable of radicalising men and boys to perpetrate damage offline.
The 35-year-old, however, is not an eccentric figure hiding in a hidden location on the dark web. Instead, his movies on TikTok, where 11.6 billion people have watched them, make him one of the most well-known celebrities there.
Andrew Tate has transformed from relative obscurity to one of the most well-known individuals in the world in a matter of months. He is known as a self-help guru and gives his primarily male audience advice on how to get money, attract women, and “escape the matrix.” His name was searched on Google more frequently in July than either Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.
His quick rise to fame wasn’t an accident. According to information gathered by the Observer, Andrew Tate’s supporters are being instructed to post a tonne of videos of him on social media, making sure huge pick the most contentious ones in order to get the most views and interaction.
Experts have labelled the coordinated effort as a “blatant attempt to manipulate the algorithm” and artificially enhance Andrew Tate’s content on TikTok. It involved hundreds of students from his private online academy Hustler’s University. With 127,000 members paying the £39 monthly fee to attend Hustler’s University, many of them men and boys from the UK and US, the technique has given him a sizable online following and may have made him millions of dollars in less than three months.
TikTok appears to have done little to stop Andrew Tate’s spread or prohibit the accounts involved, despite the fact that much of the content appears to violate the app’s rules, which expressly forbid misogyny and copycat accounts. Instead, it has helped him break into the mainstream by enabling the spread of his videos and actively encouraging young viewers to watch them.
Andrew Tate was born and raised on a Luton estate; he is the son of a chess master and a catering worker. Andrew tate has long been in the news for igniting controversy. He worked as a TV producer during his 20s while training as a kickboxer at the neighbourhood gym. He later competed professionally and won world championships.
When he was booted from Big Brother in 2016 due to a video showing him using a belt to strike a lady, his public-facing career seemed to end just as it was getting started. Shortly later, a second video showing him ordering a woman to count the bruises he allegedly gave her surfaced. Andrew Tate and the women asserted that the video only showed consensual sex and denied that any abuse had taken place.
The debate continued. His Twitter page contained homophobic and racial epithets in posts. He was then criticised by mental health organisations in September 2017 for asserting that depression “isn’t real.” The following month, he joined the #MeToo conversation by declaring that women should “carry some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. He has since repeated this opinion, which among other things caused him to lose access to Twitter.
Tate’s career and employment were both helped by the outcry. He made an appearance on Alex Jones’ InfoWars podcast, posed with far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson in photos, and visited Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower before writing on Facebook: “The Tate family support Trump FULLY. MAGA!”
Meanwhile, Facebook images show that he socialised with ardent Brexit supporter Nigel Farage in the UK and mentioned connections to anti-Islam campaigner Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. In a podcast, Andrew Tate calls Yaxley-Lennon a “decent man” with a “nice heart” who he has “hung out with countless times.” Days after Yaxley-Lennon did the same thing, Andrew Tate appeared at the home of a journalist named Mike Stuchbery in 2019 and the police were called. Yaxley-Lennon had been critical of Tate online. Stuchbery’s wife experienced a panic episode as a result of the incident, which led to their departure from the UK for Germany.
Andrew Tate’s opinions on women were also coming into focus even before he became well-known on TikTok. After seeing a sign at Heathrow airport “encouraging girls to go on holiday as opposed to encouraging being a loving mother and a faithful wife,” he lamented the “loss of Western culture” on Facebook in 2018.
He also talked frankly about being accused of abusing multiple women, though it is not known if he was finally punished with any crimes other than a traffic offence in 2018. In one interview, Tate talks of an incident in which a man struck him when a woman knocked his phone out of his hand in a club, which led to them getting into a wrestling match. He claims that during the struggle he struck the woman inadvertently, breaking her jaw.
In a different video, he claims that he was the subject of a police investigation for allegedly abusing a woman, a claim he vigorously rejected. As a result, his home was raided, his belongings were seized, and he spent two days in a jail.
Tate is believed to have departed the UK for Romania around the time UK police were looking into abuse allegations. In a video where he gave his justifications, he implied that he was moving because it would be simpler to avoid being accused of rape. In one video, he claims that this is “probably 40%” of the reason that he relocated, adding, “I’m not a rapist, but I like the concept of simply being free to do what I want. I enjoy my freedom.
More accusations would then come. Tate and his brother Tristan were reportedly “raking in millions via webcam sites where guys give over a fortune as they fall for girls’ false sob tales,” according to a January Daily Mirror investigation. They allegedly called the practise a “complete swindle.”
Following a tip from the US embassy that a 21-year-old American woman was being held against her will, authorities then stormed the brothers’ residence in April. The Tates, who were interrogated before being freed, insist they did nothing wrong. The inquiry was then broadened to include claims of rape and human trafficking, the Romanian authorities stated last week.
Online Tate’s content flourished in the midst of the conflict offline. Repackaged videos of Tate’s interviews over the past few years have been gaining millions of views on TikTok since January. However, this growth has quickened recently. More than one billion people have seen his name-tagged videos in August alone.
The posts are not made by Tate, who doesn’t seem to be active on the platform, but rather by hundreds of profiles that frequently use his name and photo and are managed by Hustler’s University users who are his fans. Members, including boys as young as 13, are informed that they may make up to £10,000 per month by taking drop shipping courses, learning about cryptocurrency investment, and referring others to Hustler’s University.
They are urged to stir up controversy to increase their chances of becoming viral in order to have the best possibility of enticing others to sign up.
Hustler’s University “students” are instructed in one manual that obtaining “comments and controversy” is essential for success: “Ideally, you want a combination of 60–70% supporters and 40–30% detractors. You want debates, and you want conflict.
At first sight, a lot of Tate videos seem innocent or even hilarious. He mocks cat owners and males who like drinking tap water to sparkling water in his signature blunt manner. He claims that “real men have dogs.” Under the heading of male self-improvement, other content is offered.
The community guidelines for TikTok, which claim that the platform is “inclusive and supportive” and prohibit content that “praises, promotes, glorifies, or supports any hateful ideology,” including misogyny, appear to define a large portion of it as hateful content.
The conditions of TikTok specifically state that they prohibit accounts from “impersonating” other users by utilising their name or image in a “misleading manner.”
However, content that was advertised to users last week on the platform seemed to be blatantly breaking the regulations.
With a blank account created for a teenage male, we started an anonymous experiment and were immediately displayed Tate’s content. We were given links to more of his videos after watching two of them, some of which had him voicing misogynistic opinions. The following time the account was formed, Tate’s posts from four distinct accounts made up the first four postings.
Tate explains in one video, which was uploaded from an account bearing his name and image, how he expects his girlfriends to act: He claims, “I exact, I expect full loyalty from my woman.” “I ain’t letting my girls hang out with other guys or like other guys. My chicks stay at home; they don’t accompany me to the club.
The results won’t surprise Tate’s followers in the least. His followers claim that his candid manner is a remedy for so-called cancel culture because a large portion of his biography is not secret but has been widely discussed in podcasts.
His growth, according to critics, raises questions about potential radicalization and online misogyny. One lady online called him “the scariest man on the internet.” Another person who posted a question on a forum claimed that after watching videos of Tate, her boyfriend’s “attitude and ideas” had “dramatically” altered.
Many of the Tate videos, according to Andrea Simon, the director of the End Violence Against Women coalition, “clearly violate” TikTok’s terms of service. She also claimed that by “taking no action,” the platform is “facilitating and ultimately profiting from the potential radicalization of its young male users.”
“Viewing such content at a young age can impact a child’s experiences and attitudes, culminating in greater harm to women and girls in and out of school and online,” the NSPCC’s Hannah Ruschen, a policy officer, added.
According to Callum Hood, director of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Tate’s ascent also demonstrates how TikTok’s algorithm is susceptible to manipulation by criminals. The risky aspect is that the content is incredibly alluring, and the TikTok algorithm in particular is so aggressive that you only need to pause for a brief period of time before it starts to suggest related stuff to you repeatedly.
It’s up to TikTok to watch out for hazardous content and abuse of its platform, he continued. Why haven’t they noticed this, one wonders? And why have they done nothing?
This past weekend, TikTok stated in a statement that it took misogyny seriously and was looking into whether any accounts were breaking its rules by posting Tate-related content.
A spokesman stated: “We are trying to investigate this content and take action against violators of our guidelines. Misogyny and other hateful views and behaviours are not accepted on TikTok. We’re constantly working to make our regulations and enforcement methods stronger, particularly through enhancing our system for making recommendations.
It did not address the allegations of platform manipulation, but it did mention that viewers could select “not interested” next to videos they find objectionable to block further content from that specific account.
Tate did not reply to calls for comment despite the fact that his post was still widely shared on the platform over the weekend.
