Andrew Tate, a controversial influencer who’s been banned on multiple platforms, has been arrested on charges of human trafficking in Romania on Dec. 29.
A man with harmful views on women and other minorities becoming popular on apps that use algorithms to push trending posts at them is harmful and allows for these ideas to radicalize young men into this ‘Anti-Woke’ and misogynistic ideology.
Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist, has a platform that is filled with hate, mostly directed at women.
“If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bear some responsibility,” was the tweet that got him banned from Twitter in 2017, though his account was reinstated as of November 2022. A man with these harmful views like this being popular and influential on large platforms allows his ideas to spread. 
The internet can create an echo chamber – a place where people’s ideas are reinforced by like-minded individuals without countering opinions. This leads to harmful ideas becoming confirmed and normalized where they would otherwise run the risk of being considered ‘inappropriate’. With an app like Tik Tok, made with machine learning that caters to what the users prefer, the algorithm can quickly throw users into an echo chamber where their views are never challenged. Tate’s videos being constantly fed to impressionable young people leads to his viewers becoming even more deeply entrenched in misogynistic views.
Andrew Tate is influencing young men and boys to be resentful towards women and is a gateway to an even more harmful ideology. While Tate himself is not an incel, he mirrors a lot of other people in the ‘manosphere’, a network of online men’s communities who promote anti-feminist and sexist beliefs blaming women, specifically feminists for all sorts of problems in society. The incel mindset is harmful to men, as it teaches them to blame women for their own unhappiness and even promotes violence directed toward girls.
A way to combat this rise of misogyny is to educate children about the topic in schools and counteract common misconceptions surrounding the way women are thought about in society. Teaching students to combat gender norms will allow them to be able to express themselves without the weight of fitting into society on their shoulders. Boys who grow up feeling secure in their masculinity will not try to overcompensate by degrading women and not fall for people like Andrew Tate’s ideas.
Even though Tate is banned on many large social media platforms, his videos and mindset will continue to spread harmful ideas to impressionable people, and getting rid of his accounts will not get rid of his content. The problem of the spread of violent misogyny does not start or begin with Andrew Tate.
