Andrew Tate

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2022 · TikTok, through clips posted by members of his paid course Hustler's University · Also known as Top G; Emory Andrew Tate III; King Cobra

What it is

Andrew Tate is a British-American former kickboxer, born in 1986, who became one of the most watched and most argued-about men online in 2022. He made short videos telling young men that women should obey them, that money and fast cars made a man worth something, and that ordinary jobs were a trap. He sold paid online courses on getting rich. He has been charged with serious crimes including rape and human trafficking in Romania and the UK, and denies all of them.

Where it came from

Tate won kickboxing world titles between 2011 and 2014. In 2016 he was removed from the British reality show Big Brother after a video surfaced that appeared to show him hitting a woman, which he said was consensual. He ran a webcam pornography business with his brother Tristan, later from Romania. Twitter, a site for short public posts, reportedly banned him in 2017 over comments about sexual assault. In 2022 he exploded on TikTok, an app for short phone videos, because Hustler's University members cut his interviews into clips and posted them in huge numbers. Meta, TikTok and YouTube banned him in August 2022. Twitter let him back that November.

Why it mattered

For a lot of lonely young men he was the first loud voice online telling them their problems had a cause and a fix, and the fix was money, muscle and control over women. Teachers in Britain and elsewhere reported boys repeating his views in class. His arrest in Romania in December 2022, days after Greta Thunberg mocked him on Twitter, made him a punchline and, to fans, a martyr at the same time. The bans didn't end his reach: clips kept circulating, and he carried on through Twitter, Rumble and his own sites.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Tate shows that by 2022 you could buy reach by paying your own customers to repost you, and that the platforms banned him only after the clips had done their work. It also shows teenage boys repeating a man's views on women as a joke and as a belief at the same time.

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