It is hard to imagine, but social media was once heralded as the saviour of global democracy. When the Arab Spring protests erupted across the Middle East in 2010, Twitter and Facebook helped nascent democratic movements to mobilise against authoritarian Governments. Technology was supposed to be the great liberator, ushering in a new age of plurality and free speech.
Fast-forward a decade and a bald man in designer sunglasses is puffing a cigar and ranting at a camera. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up b****”, he barks, describing how he would attack a woman if she accused him of cheating. His name is Andrew Tate and the clip will go on to be watched by millions of young men, polluting the internet with violent misogyny.
Sky’s Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate & The Dark Side of the Internet is an attempt to explain how the utopia once envisaged by Silicon Valley became a nightmare. While the BBC and Vice have already produced excellent documentaries on Tate, the programme is a more thoughtful look at the darker forces that gave birth to him. It is impossible not to watch this documentary and feel the urge to log off every social media device on your phone. For good.
The documentary begins in the late 1980s with the explosion in popularity of video games marketed primarily at young men. Many of these involved typical hypermasculine fantasies: muscular men gunning down everything in sight and saving a scantily-clad damsel in distress. Max Fisher, a journalist at the New York Times, explains that this helped to form the basis of early internet culture: a space for men to escape the trappings of liberal feminism.
As social media began to explode, Tate was capitalising on it. He made a name for himself as a brash, mouthy kickboxer with the nickname “King Cobra”, before shooting to national fame as a controversial guest on Big Brother in 2016. “I am going to become the most hated man in the world,” he told the Big Brother camera in an eerie foreshadowing of the future. Just six days after entering the programme, he was removed after the tabloid media published footage of him hitting a woman with a belt, an incident he claimed was consensual.
Before long, Tate had become a divisive online firebrand, feeding the emerging “incel” subculture as it began to emerge on YouTube. However, it took the Covid pandemic and the explosion in popularity of TikTok for him to achieve worldwide notoriety.
He soon became omnipresent on the app, creating a feedback loop of rage-clicks and engagement that helped him draw a huge following of disaffected teenage boys stuck at home in lockdown. Many of these young men joined Tate’s “Hustler’s University” for £36 a month, where they were encouraged to flood TikTok with videos of him in a bid to manipulate the algorithm. Social media companies largely turned a blind eye to this, despite a tangible rise in online and physical threats to women, because it brought them eyeballs and advertising revenue.
Tate did face justice, of a sort. He is currently awaiting trial in Romania along with his brother Tristan and two Romanian female suspects for human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, allegations they have denied. Separately, Andrew and Tristan are both wanted in the UK to face allegations of sexual assault, which they also deny.
Watching Doom Scroll, I was struck by how absent social media is from our current political discourse. It barely featured in the most recent UK general election, despite claims that Reform may have used fake accounts to influence voters. In the US, conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on Trump earlier this month received millions of views and retweets on X. A viral tweet can have a peculiar psychological effect. We may know something to be objectively true, but if millions of others believe in the lie… perhaps we could be wrong?
Grappling with these issues is an urgent task for policymakers. The UK’s national lead for policing violence against women and girls, Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth, has warned that online influencers like Tate are radicalising young men in a similar way to terrorists. Teachers and teenage girls are reporting a huge increase in misogynistic abuse from male pupils. Doom Scroll offers a chilling vision of a future in which hatred is tolerated as long as it delivers profits.
