Children as young as 10-11 (possibly younger) are aware of the name Andrew Tate, they may not fully understand the controversial figure and what he stands for, but they do recognize the name. Worryingly, some do know what he stands for and post-pandemic his name has begun to drip-feed through school corridors and playgrounds.
So, how have our young people become exposed to him? A 36-year-old, ex-kickboxer who boasts about dating younger women because they are more likely to have been untouched by other men and believes that women are the property of their partner. His content and message is entirely inappropriate for our young people so how has it even reached them?
The simple answer is social media. That dark entity that lurks in the shadows as a very real and threatening problem to teenage mental health. In August when Andrew Tate first appeared on a lot of teachers’ radars he had 11 billion views on TikTok; data gathered by ‘Social Shepherd’ shows that kids surveyed in both the US and UK spend an average of 75 minutes a day on TikTok, eclipsing the amount of time they spend on other social media sites, making it their go-to social media platform. But what makes TikTok different?
TikTok’s main user base is between the ages of 10-29, with 10-19 year olds making up 24% of users in the UK and it has faced a lot of criticism since its creation in 2016, especially when it comes to dangerous challenges that its algorithm has given rise to, such as the ‘Benadryl Challenge’ and the ‘Blackout Challenge’, which led to at least one death. And herein lies our problem with the kind of content our young people are viewing…the algorithm.
The TikTok algorithm works unlike any other social media platform in that as soon as you create an account your ‘For You Page’ (FYP) is immediately populated with videos that are considered ‘most popular’ across the app – this means, if Andrew Tate’s videos (being pushed by subscribers to his ‘Hustlers University’) are popular on TikTok at that time, there’s a higher chance that they will appear on your FYP, no matter who you are. It’s only when you begin using the app more frequently that the content becomes customized to you, this of course, brings its own set of dangers. In an article written in ‘The Guardian’ in October 2022 it was stated, ‘Studies show that when chronological feeds are discarded in favor of suggested content, the algorithm frequently gives rise to more extreme views’ and a report commissioned in 2021 showed 70% of extremist content found on YouTube was recommended to users via their algorithm. This then incentivizes users to share attention-grabbing content because it gets more attention from users.
So, what has all this got to do with Andrew Tate? By and large the young people that we teach have been exposed to Tate through social media and some clever marketing. At the beginning of his rise to ‘fame’ Tate tapped into a very specific group of internet users; men who were feeling lost, insecure, and unsure of their place in the world. He offered them motivational messages, something to aim for and promoted himself as ‘wanting to help’ men become as ‘successful’ as him – mainly having enough money to buy a lot of cars, it seems. Once followers had been encouraged to subscribe to his ‘Hustler’s University’ for a hefty fee part of their job was to populate the internet with videos featuring him, edit and cut longer interviews and swamp social media pages with his content. Tate himself, didn’t even have to have his own social media page on some sites, the work was being done for him by his followers. If you take into account how algorithms work, especially on TikTok the chances of our young people coming across his content is pretty high. There is an excellent chapter in Laura Bates’ ‘Men Who Hate Women’, titled ‘Men who take advantage of other men’, that is exactly what Tate has done, and now that he’s been reinstated on social media sites, continues to do.
One of the main problems with teenagers and young people being exposed to Andrew Tate is that a lot of them think he is one of two things:
- Someone to aspire to be like. Especially his cars and money.
- Someone who they don’t take seriously, and therefore find funny.
Both of these are deeply problematic but for different reasons. The version of masculinity that Tate promotes is rooted in toxicity and the patriarchal role that men have been forced to endure the pressures of for centuries – in order to be a ‘man’ you must go to the gym, have muscles, be strong, earn lots of money, get married, have kids, provide for a family. If you are struggling then you are weak, if you cry or show any kind of emotion then, in Tate’s own words ‘Men who live without self-control are the kind of men who cry when their girlfriend cheats on them, cause she doesn’t respect a little cry baby’. At this point I’ll state that the leading cause of death in men under the age of 45 in the UK is suicide.
The second problem is perhaps harder to unpick because it’s easy to dismiss boys finding him funny as meaning they think he’s an idiot and aren’t therefore listening to his views, this isn’t the case. Men like Tate, Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan are gateway misogynists; they masquerade as ‘challengers’, people who have ‘alternative’ views and are therefore ‘controversial’ – the things they say are treated as satire, and to challenge them is met with a barrage of ‘Oh, no-one can take a joke these days! He doesn’t mean it!’ – but faced with that kind of content on a regular basis, through a TikTok account, Twitter feed or the pages of a newspaper it quickly becomes normalized, and over time the misogynistic views that were once laughed at begin to be taken more seriously, perhaps the person viewing them finds themselves agreeing and from there that tiny spark begins to grow into a much bigger beast.
And within that beast lies an uncomfortable truth of modern discourse. That, especially for the alt-Right, words are contagious and language is a weapon. Trump was a master of it. Morgan likes to think he is. Regardless of the supposed intent of the language used, and the protestations when it is called out; whether it is ‘self-help’, whether it is ‘a joke’, or whether it is outright hate, social media allows us to chop it up, edit it, recontextualise it, frame it in whatever way suits our narrative. Young people, young boys may laugh at Tate’s nonsense, but the language still exists, it permeates, and we need to address its implications.
Miss P Teaches. 