The video is no more than 30 seconds long. Andrew Tate dressed in a tailored black shirt, opened to reveal a sprawling chest tattoo, behind oversized sunglasses, talking about men “getting their life in order".
“Tell the truth. Be honourable. Make as much money as you can. Be polite to everybody. Go to the gym. Get in good shape. Find other guys who are on the same mission as you.” The controversial social media influencer speaks clearly and confidently, his clean, refined image appearing in many ways to be the epitome of success.
This is just one example of a school of videos I have found during a few hours spent on TikTok, trying to find out what sort of content is being shown to young viewers. If it all sounds flashy and alluring - who doesn’t want to succeed? Yet it in fact belies something much more dangerous. Within hours, I will find countless examples of violence, misogyny, horrific attitudes and stereotypes towards women and blatant sexism.
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Often edited into videos of Tate uploaded by fans are sleek panoramas depicting all kinds of glamour; flashy hotels, exotic vistas, attractive women in skimpy dresses, fast cars and nightclubs. The typical symbols of success, the things we’re constantly told are the most desirable in life.
But in the space of little over a week on TikTok, I find countless videos depicting misogyny, sexism, violence towards women and extremely harmful stereotypes by accounts featuring Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate and others. They include referring to women as "b*tches", saying anyone who has slept with more than five men "belong to the streets." They also define a woman worth "love" as someone who leaves their phone unlocked for you to check, doesn't leave the room to take calls, brings you coffee and tolerates being cheated on.
Some videos advocate "[knocking] the living sh*t out of" a woman if she hits a man. Others talk about having a "sex map" for women you meet around the world, why you shouldn't tolerate nightclubs with "ugly women" and women being shamed for their menstrual cycles.
Around the UK and Wales, schoolteachers and parents have raised major concerns about the misogyny, sexism and distorted views of the world being spouted by people like Andrew Tate. While it is often packaged as preaching hard work, determination and “no excuses”, Tate’s views have caused huge worry for parents of young people and men, headteachers and social media bosses, who fear the impact it is having on young children.
A former professional boxer raised in Luton, Andrew Tate rose to fame after he was removed from British reality TV show Big Brother in 2016 following the release of a video that appeared to show him attacking a woman. Tate, 36, said at the time that the footage had been edited and was "a total lie trying to make me look bad." But his notoriety in recent years has come mainly from his motivational speeches and appearances on podcast on other media.
In 2017, Tate's account posted on Twitter that women "must bare some responsibility" if they are raped or sexually assaulted. Videos have also circulated of Tate describing what to do if a woman accused a man of cheating: "It's bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up b*tch." Tate has also spoken about "18 and 19 year olds" being more attractive than 26 year olds because men can leave an "imprint" on them and "make them a good person."
Tate has denied holding misogynistic views and accused his critics of "twisting facts", although he has also previously told a YouTuber he was "absolutely a misogynist", and added: "I'm a realist and when you're a realist, you're sexist. There's no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist."
Who is Andrew Tate and why are people so worried?
The onslaught of Tate content being shared online has worried social media firms. Last August, he was banned from Facebook and Instagram for violating parent company Meta’s policies on "dangerous individuals". He had 4.7 million Instagram followers before his official account was deleted. TikTok also banned an account belonging to Tate, saying at the time it had begun investigating the content and adding: "Misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated on TikTok."
Tate and his brother Tristan have been detained in Romania since December after being arrested in connection with rape, people trafficking and organised crime offences. Both have denied any wrongdoing. It was confirmed earlier this week that the pair will remain in custody in Romania for a fourth consecutive month. But despite their detention, the influence of both Tates and others like them has loomed large. Videos tagged under #AndrewTate have been viewed more than 14 billion times on TikTok, with thousands of fan and duplicate accounts continuing to share and post snippets from his interviews. On YouTube the trend has been similar, with numerous fan channels filling the void and re-posting videos that see millions of views. Despite his detention in Romania, Tate's official Twitter account, which has 5.4 million followers, remains active and regularly updated.
For its part, TikTok says it has used software to identify and remove re-uploads of videos found to violate its guidelines, as well as flagging certain content so it won't be recommended to users' For You feeds. But concerns have been raised over the number of young people who are consuming Tate and other similar content on social media, and the influence it could be having on their views towards women and society.
'Never hit a woman, but if she hits you, knock the living sh*t out of her'
I wanted to investigate the success of this crackdown on harmful content, so I joined TikTok, where Tate content is still racking up huge numbers, to see what sort of videos were being recommended. I created an account and set my age to 15, with the goal of seeing what I was recommended over time without specifically seeking it out.
I set a few basic preferences for content - sport, cooking, entertainment - and began scrolling through the account set to my actual age. The content was fairly benign; people singing, football, Holly Willoughby, Tyson Fury, work memes, some clips from comedy panel shows. Lewis Capaldi on a Stena Line ship, some dark humour.
After about an hour on this account, I set up a separate account, this time with my age set to 15. There was some overlap; both accounts had a fair amount of boxing content, and Piers Morgan clips. But almost immediately some of it changed to things that would understandably be more relevant to a young teenager - pranks and jokes about school, some videos of young girls dancing and videos about working out and being successful.
About 20 minutes into scrolling on my TikTok For You feed - an endless chain of videos recommended by an algorithm, based on what you watch - I got to a video from an account called MoneyMotivationMasculinity featuring a snippet of Jim Carrey talking on the Jimmy Kimmel talk show, with a caption about the Illuminati, commonly referred today as a vague secret society often said to be conspiring to control world affairs.
I clicked into this account and found a host of videos, many of whom featured the popular podcaster Joe Rogan. I watched a few, mainly about working out and dispelling the idea that there is any shame in wanting to look good. I dipped out of this profile after a few videos and went back to my For You feed, and was almost immediately recommended one from a man purporting to "hypnotise your anxiety away forever." Following this, I was recommended some celebrity videos before one of controversial media commentator Jordan Peterson on a talk show debating whether or not trans women were women. A cursory dip into the comments on this showed people of all ages were engaging; there was a woman with a family photo as her profile picture, and a middle aged man posing with what looked like his daughter.
Clicking into the account that had posted this video, called Unwoke Citizen, I was met with clips of all the usual suspects harping on about the culture war hot topics - Katie Hopkins, the controversial media commentator who was permanently suspended from Twitter for violating its hateful conduct policy in 2020, and Milo Yiannopoulos, a British alt-right political commentator.
Approaching an hour in, the algorithm was already throwing up some new flavours, notably along the lines of masculinity and women. I was met with an interview clip of Katie Hopkins giving her thoughts on none other than Andrew Tate, saying she "loves that he exists" and speaking positively about her 14 year old son being a fan. 14 is a year younger than the age I have set my age as on TikTok.
Another quick scroll and I watch a troubling video from a faceless account saying "never hit a woman, but if she hits you, knock the living sh*t out of her." This is the first openly violent video I have seen so far. Following that, I get a video about Tristan Tate, Andrew Tate’s brother, and then an account by a man called Jamie Leon that has nearly 100,000 followers. In the video, Leon claims he believes Andrew Tate will never be released from prison and that it will be a “fake suicide or some sort of health issue.” There are over 400 comments and 25,000 views on this one, many of which are urging Tate's release. Then, another video commenting on Tate’s appeal being denied which has almost 700 comments, many of which are supportive of his potential release.
Now, I must admit that I’m far from the biggest social media user and probably out of touch in some ways. But some of the language being used by those commenting on the above videos piqued my interest. Firstly, I noted several references to the Matrix such as "the matrix went in hard", "the matrix are desperate now" and "the matrix is glitching" in the comments on videos featuring Andrew or Tristan Tate. The term refers to 1999 film The Matrix, which is about a virtual world which has been pulled over the minds of people to hide them from the truth. It is a simulation that hides the fact that the world is being controlled by machines, using humans as an energy resource.
A minute or two’s Googling leads me to numerous articles on Andrew Tate's arrest; a tweet posted to Tate's official Twitter account in January this year, shortly following his arrest in Romania, said: "The Matrix has attacked me. But they misunderstand, you cannot kill an idea. Hard to Kill." I also found a video of Tate where he can be heard saying"'the matrix has attacked me."
The implication here is clear; citing The Matrix suggests there are other forces targeting what Tate would call free thinkers like himself. This is a particularly powerful line to take in the context of social media companies shutting him down, and further fuel for anyone consuming content involving him who thinks important information is being withheld from them by the media. But more on that later.
There are also multiple references to 'Top G' such as 'Free Top G'. A cursory Google search tells me this is a reference to Andrew Tate who is known as 'Top G' by many of his fans.
Casually dropping references to a Keanu Reeves sci-fi film might sound innocent, but the idea that you can convince people that you are being targeted by a higher power is extremely dangerous given the responses on some of these videos, which seem to be repeating the idea that external forces are conspiring against Tate. Another term frequently used by those commenting is 'rizz''. Urban Dictionary tells me this is a slang term for skill in charming or seducing a potential romantic partner, especially through verbal communication.
Interestingly, I noticed some TikTok users wondering if Tate content is being censored and that they had seen less recently. But not long after, I saw a video of Tate himself, dressed in a tight collared shirt, flashy sunglasses and with his brash, assertive tones, speaking about why you might be failing as a man. (Spoiler: you are spending too much time gaming or eating pizza, apparently).
Although I have yet to search for anything specific or like any videos, the content on my feed is starting to get slightly more extreme. There is a video with the title ‘Can a UFC female fighter beat a normal man?’ involving Tate speaking to a table of women on a podcast about how they would be a “f*cking mess” if they were to be attacked by a man. It’s one supremely overconfident man practically shouting at a table of silent women, and a bit uncomfortable to watch, but couldn't really be considered misogynistic on its own. The comments below this one include users saying people “underestimate how much physically stronger” men are than women, “especially when filled with adrenaline and anger.”
So far I’ve been using TikTok for probably an hour and a half, and already a lot of my For You feed is taken up with content either about or featuring Andrew Tate. It’s not taken a whole lot of effort to get to this point. Nothing other than scrolling my feed and watching videos.
The next video displays a boy who looks like he is in his teens discussing a theory about the Tates’ imprisonment. Clicking into this profile, I’m struck first of all by how young this person is, and also by some of their content which includes referring to women as “b*tches”, saying women who sleep with more than five men “belong to the streets” and claiming life is “ten times harder for men” than it is for women. There is also a lot of content about Andrew Tate's imprisonment.
It would be dangerous to suggest the misogyny young men are being exposed to online boils down to one person. But from my time on TikTok so far, it’s clear Andrew Tate has created a dangerous culture of personality, if so much of his content is appearing on my feed despite him being banned. Among some of the videos I see are taken by excited fans outside his home.
Two hours into my time on TikTok, my recommendations range from not very much Tate content to as high as maybe 70-80%. Among other content are videos about transgender people, women dancing and more motivational videos. There is also quite a wide crossover between those who are commenting on the videos. Many praise the virtues of masculinity, getting ahead, getting rich and successful and being fully in charge of your own life. There are young men posing shirtless, with lots of self-recorded videos of them in the gym.
While many of those commenting appear to be younger, they're not exclusively male - there are women and girls too. One’s bio says ‘I’m a loner, I respect and love Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate’. Her content appears to be confessional videos with descriptions such as “think before you talk bad about men.” In one video, she says she is just 15. Another commenter says: "The Tate brothers are the reason I developed a more mature, logical, sophisticated, conscious mindset. I stand with Andrew and Tristan 'till the grave."
It gets steadily worse. Next, a generic ‘Life content’ account talks about girls “never being in 100% good health” and talking negatively about headaches and periods with the caption “do you need some vitamins or something?” The comments under this one are troubling and openly misogynistic; “because they love the attention”, “because they want attention and don’t have any own hobbies but to complain”, “offer them to go for shopping they will be 100% fit and healthy.” Immediately following this is a clip of a Tristan Tate interview titled “the secret to getting laid.” A few scrolls later, there is an Andrew Tate video where he speaks about women between 18 and 25 “living these crazy lifestyles” before criticising their choice to have more than one partner. The tone is not particularly awful, but the indignation at women making their own choices is ironic, given the sort of ultra-male freedom these figures espouse.
Increasingly, the Tate content is becoming more focused on attitudes towards women. One features Tristan talking about "eliminating beauty" and defining women who he wants to "love" as opposed to just "sleep with". The criteria here is chilling; Giving massages, making coffee in the morning, cleaning the house, but also leaving their phone around unlocked and not caring if he checks it, and never leaving the room to take a call in private. These, apparently, are the qualities women worth "love" are supposed to have.
With this sort of content, there is little wonder Tate is causing a major problem for headteachers and parents of young children. WalesOnline recently spoke to teachers who said male pupils were taking in the former Big Brother contestant's brand of toxic masculinity, something they said they feared could impact on their behaviour towards young girls.
“A lot of boys look up to him as a figure of male strength," said one teacher in a south Wales secondary. "When you try to talk to some of them about the truth of Andrew Tate they just don’t believe that he has been locked up suspicion of rape and trafficking and say it’s 'fake news'." The teacher said she was worried about the influence these views had on girls, most of whom chose to “stay silent” when boys started talking about and defending Tate in class. “I talked to one boy who said the reason he listened to and followed Andrew Tate was because he didn’t have a dad. I think a lack of positive male influence feeds into this.
“Some of the boys genuinely want to have conversations about Tate, not just to be controversial. But I think in the end it could create a disregard towards female authority in schools and also dangerous attitudes towards girls their own age.” Other teachers in Wales have spoken about the difficulties in tackling the issues; on the one hand, some say there is a policy of refusing to tolerate any discussion about Tate whilst fearing this could make him more appealing and prevent boys hearing the truth.
To be clear, there is nothing necessarily wrong with young people and men wanting to improve themselves or their lives. Social media may not be the greatest place to find that inspiration, but that is a matter for each individual. On the surface, Andrew Tate preaches hard work, determination and “no excuses”, arguing that there is nothing wrong with being relentless in improving yourself as a man. It is hard to dismiss these values in and of themselves, and it is entirely understandable that they would appeal to young men who are struggling to find their place in the world, or being told all around them that they need to check their privilege without necessarily understanding why.
The problem is that, in many cases, young boys are accepting this content and could be thinking everything Andrew Tate says is right as a result. A lot of it is simply old-school ‘manly man’ values repackaged as something new, but what is frightening is just how easy it has been to find this content without looking very hard. While most of it is not openly violent, much of it would surely be hugely worrying to parents and headteachers of a teenager with a TikTok account.
I spent around six hours in TikTok in total, spread over the course of a week or so. Not all the content I saw was similar to the above. There was plenty of innocuous stuff, like boxing videos, memes, news snippets, funny confessionals and jokes. Some of it was just poor humour. But in almost all the more sinister ones, women were rarely celebrated for their own qualities, potential or achievements. Their worth is centred almost entirely on what they do for the men in question, or how much control they allow them over their lives. They are presented as entitled to make their own choices, but those choices in almost all cases lead to them being deemed surplus to requirements, and they are treated as disposable and beneath men and their ongoing quests for money and success. Women are to be treated with suspicion - several videos I see speak about ‘background checks’ on women and their families to find out if they are likely to be unfaithful. This is exactly why this sort of content is so dangerous.
Many of the videos are voiced over on top of montages featuring cars, exotic locations, wild parties and expensive-looking watches. Whether this makes Tate content less easy to spot and flag, I don't know. Another video featuring Tristan Tate begins with: “Your wife’s a b*tch” before appearing to espouse the virtues of a partner who accepts unfaithful behaviour, adding: “The woman who really loves you is like ‘look, I know you have another girl… Tears streaming down her face but ‘I really love you, please don’t leave me’. That’s the woman that loves you.”
Whether the content is from Andrew or Tristan Tate or not, the tone remains similar. One non-Tate video encourages people to “Always choose younger women” and says “don’t settle for a woman past her prime.” Non-Tate videos at this point include lots (really, lots) on how to make money and be successful, young girls dancing provocatively, lots of MMA and boxing short videos. There is a short clip from the notorious American Psycho film, about a violent, misogynistic man, and videos on ‘cheat codes’ for how to get women; a video from a young man who appears to have travelled to Andrew Tate’s home with fellow fans. Clicking on this profile, there are lots of cars and captions about impressing women.
There is more content that can only be described as disparaging or degrading to women. One shows Tristan Tate speaking about refusing to allow a female partner attend a business meeting with “important” people before telling her to go home after letting her attend so he can take them to a strip club. A video from that same account depicts Tristan saying “You shouldn’t go to a club and have ugly women around. I don't think that's the indicator of a good club." Another talks about Hustlers University, the old name of Andrew Tate's online business where thousands of people pay £40 a month for tips on getting rich and dealing with life. In yet another, Tristan is heard boasting about having a “sex map” for women he speaks to in different parts of the world that he can contact when he is travelling.
Worrying attitudes towards women continue with one account with nearly 500,000 followers shaming women for the number of men they have slept with, comparing it to job candidates with “20 jobs in the last ten years” on their resume, and how this is a major red flag for many employers.
Next, Nocontextboxing has a supposedly funny video captioned ‘me in school when the blue haired girl starts voicing her opinions’ accompanied by a video of Conor McGregor at a press event loudly telling his boxing opponent to “shut their f*cking mouth.” Not exactly a healthy way to be teaching people to think about women, yet it has 35,000 likes.
Opening TikTok again on my phone later, within three videos I get more Andrew Tate content. One of them is tagged #tate, which I click into. I’m immediately into content featuring Tate interviews where he is heard bragging about multiple relationships while talking about those women being allowed to sleep with other men as “atrocious, disgusting.”
I then get, courtesy of Boldly Masculine, ‘how to gain control over anyone’, followed by a video of reality TV star Stephen Bear, who is currently serving 21 months behind bars and has been placed on the sex offenders register for sharing footage of him having sex with former partner Georgia Harrison without her permission. Then, a sad video about a man who says his friends have been “brainwashed by Andrew Tate” and how they talk about the “matrix”, shaming “brokeys” and how depression isn’t real - exactly the kind of things I have watched. This individual speaks about how their friends seamlessly cite Tate’s less radical takes alongside the more serious, harmful ones. It goes on and on.
There are some caveats to my TikTok activity. Firstly, I did not spend as much time on my older account as my newer one. Secondly, as a TikTok spokesperson pointed out, my activity of spending lots of time on the platform and watching videos fully through is slightly different to how many people use it. According to them, many simply scroll through lots of videos for a few minutes at a time before closing the app again. The time I spent on the platform arguably gave the TikTok algorithm a lot more time to refine my preferences. This makes sense, if it's doing its job. The next point is, I was clearly looking for the type of content described above. Given how the algorithm works, it is completely reasonable that I would be recommended more content similar to what I was looking for and therefore watching.
That said, it took just over an hour before I started getting content related to Andrew Tate and other similar videos. And all it took was staying on long enough. I did not search for anything or even click like on a single video.
Welsh Women's Aid told WalesOnline it was concerned about the sort of content being shared with younger users on social media. A spokesperson said: "As the use of social media apps that utilise algorithms to suggest content to users without them having to follow or like a video increases, violence against women and girls including rape culture, harmful stereotypes, sexism and misogyny is becoming more accessible and more normalised.
"Users can find themselves very quickly being shown and suggested content creators like Andrew Tate, and others who benefit from harmful content being promoted to app users. Even positive content aimed towards young boys and men can progress to videos of content creators expressing highly misogynistic views which can have a lasting, damaging impact.
"These spaces are used to express a hateful and disrespectful rhetoric towards women and girls and are left largely unchallenged, spreading without accountability or consequences. There must be a thorough re-evaluation of how these algorithms are functioning - responsibility lies both with social media companies and with the government to provide robust laws and policies around online safety, taking into account how this content detrimentally affects women and girls.
"This problem does not exist in silo. These dangerous attitudes, values and behaviours facilitate online abuse and contribute to violence and oppression in the physical world. This is a new part of the epidemic of violence against women and girls. It must be taken seriously."
A 2022 report from Ofcom found 74% of internet users aged 16-24 used TikTok, compared to just 34% of all internet users, showing how skewed use is towards younger viewers. Instagram (90% of 16-24 internet users) and Snapchat (83%) were even higher. Another Ofcom report, also from 2022, on news consumption found TikTokhas seen a marked increase in reach for news from 2020 (1%) to 2022 (7%) and over half (52%) of its user base for news are aged 16-24. The report said users of TikTok for news get more of their news on TikTok from ‘other people they follow’ than from ‘news organisations’.
This is another area where the consumption of some of the content above is worrying. A study last year found Andrew Tate is better known among 'generation Z' men - generally comprising those born between 1996 and 2010 - than the current prime minister Rishi Sunak. As the hundreds of comments on some of the TikTok videos show, Tate's grip on people is strong despite him being behind bars. Dozens of comments refer to his arrest and detention being some sort of conspiracy or attempt to silence him.
It shows how far this problem has come. If people are convinced that there is some hidden ‘truth’ that they are not being told about in everyday life, or through traditional media, there are very few limits to how far they can be shaped by people on social media. But the more important lesson here is that seven months after Andrew Tate was kicked off TikTok, it remains very easy for young men and others to make a TikTok account (it took me about a minute) and end up down a dark, misogynistic rabbit hole with just a few hours of passive activity. Furthermore, it shows the scale of the challenge facing not just TikTok, but any social media platform trying to successfully shut down content that might be inappropriate for younger generations.
I contacted TikTok regarding most of the worst-offending videos cited above, and noticed within 24 hours that most had been removed. I was also told by a spokesperson that action had been taken on any account where bans were deemed to be necessary. More than 110 million videos have been removed from TikTok between July and September 2022 for violating its community guidelines. As well as banning Andrew and Tristan Tate last year, the platform has been taking action against accounts and videos relating to them and deploying extra technology to clamp down on any Tate content that violates their policies.
Since last year, TikTok has also taken a number of steps to crack down on misogyny, such as defining it as hateful ideology in its guidelines, while it has also taken steps towards increasing safety for young people such as offering privacy controls to under-18s, providing resources to parents including its Family Pairing features and its Guardian's Guide to TikTok and partnering with child safety experts.
TikTok has also been testing ways of avoiding too much similar content on its For You feed, including a new feature a new feature that allows people to refresh their For You feeds when recommendations no longer feel relevant or entertaining. It has also introduced Content Levels to and prevent content with overtly mature themes from reaching audiences between ages 13-17.
A TikTok spokesperson said: "Misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated on TikTok. We remove any such content found to violate our community guidelines, and regularly evaluate and improve our processes to help keep TikTok safe for our community."
Have you been targeted by misogynistic content on social media, or are you a parent worried about social media use among young people? Get in touch at ryan.oneill@walesonline.co.uk
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