The following programme contains
strong language, scenes of a
sexual nature, and scenes which
some viewers may find distressing.
(BIRDSONG)
(TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)
(WHITE NOISE)
Microsoft launched a new
artificial intelligence powered chatbot
to talk with you on Twitter.
Artificial intelligence chatbot
named Tay was designed to respond
to questions and
conversations on Twitter
with the personality
of a teenage girl.
MAX: In 2016, Microsoft
launched this chatbot called Tay.
The idea was that by
chatting with users on Twitter,
it would learn what
human conversation is like.
Was based on machine learning,
which is a kind of
artificial intelligence.
What it was doing was learning
what is the sequence of words,
the specific types of sentiment
and emotions that are going to
be most effective on social media?
Within 24 hours, this spot had
become like an alt-right pro-Trump n*zi.
Humans working for Microsoft
had to intervene when Tay,
their chatty I bot, started tweeting
some pretty bad Hitler stuff.
She took on a rather
offensive r*cist tone,
a lot of messages about
genocide and the Holocaust.
Microsoft immediately started
hitting delete on her comments.
Part of that was bad
actors deliberately training it
by feeding it extreme content.
But mostly the Tay bot
was just reproducing how
people on social
media were interacting.
Nobody gives a damn about men.
This is smoking g*n 1
in 85 trillion quadrillion.
I mean, this, this...
We are living in an
attention economy.
People are encouraged and
emboldened to become more outrageous,
more characterful, more
dramatic, more offensive than ever.
They're skanks. (LAUGHS)
I mean, that's what they
f*cking are. They're skanks.
Deport and step up
support, OK? Alright?
MAX: Because of the way
that social media works,
it can be just someone
from total obscurity.
And they will get lifted
up by these platforms,
because it is what the systems want,
and they know how to cultivate that.
Strap on an AK 47 and
g*n down innocent people.
And it's exactly what
happened with Andrew Tate.
I believe that a man
should be in charge.
I believe your woman
should obey you.
HARRIET: The mainstream media
start to pay attention, and you see
characters rise up who might not
have become famous otherwise.
One of the most infamous
men in the world, Andrew Tate's
misogynistic tirades have been
viewed billions of times online.
Any man who's relatively capable
as a man will always be able
to whoop your a*s, r*pe
you, strangle you, k*ll you.
Anything he wants to do.
BRIANNA: We probably
should have seen this coming.
A really good question to ask
yourself as an engineer is how
can the thing you built be used
by a really, really terrible person?
It's not something we
ask ourselves very often.
MATTHEW: You have unbelievable
corporate knowledge about what
their products are doing
in complete total disregard
and elevation of profits
over public safety.
A. TATE: Getting the girl,
f*cking the girl is the
first 10% of the game.
JOE: There's complicity
all over the place.
Social media platforms have
to bear a huge responsibility
for allowing that content to reach
billions of people around the world.
Then we have to ask
what about wider society?
Why is it that young men are
finding a voice in Andrew Tate?
Why are we not having
those conversations
and getting those things right?
The big question, I guess, is
who's to blame for Andrew Tate?
(TENSE MUSIC)
So as you were saying, you're
blowing up on the internet.
I've conquered all of the
internet. All of the internet.It's mine.
(TYRES SQUEALING)
MAX: Someone like Andrew
Tate is not an accident.
He doesn't just happen.
CROWD: f*ck Instagram!
A. TATE: f*ck Instagram!
If you want to understand where he
comes from, you have to understand
how these social media
platforms were first built,
why they were built that way,
and what they were designed to do.
(ELECTRONIC CRACKLING)
Social media first goes
wide in the early mid 2000s,
and it's people who,
for whatever reason,
are looking to socialise
through their computer.
It's undergraduates.
It's a lot of young men.
It's a lot of adolescent boys.
All I want is a computer.
Now hold on, Dad.
It's just $849 for all of this.
Parents tend to spend more
on boys than they do on girls.
So computer makers,
video game manufacturers
choose to market to boys.
(CRASHING SOUNDS)
These hyper masculine
male characters.
Well, how could
you let that happen?
MAX: You're going to
go save the princess.
And it is something that
is like super traditional.
MAN: (IN GAME) Give me
some sugar. Shake it baby.
Men are supposed to be strong
and masculine and dominant,
and women are
supposed to be submissive.
And that's the
content that dominates.
It's a lot of young men who were
looking for a place in the world,
and were trying to figure out
who they were and how they fit in.
That gets built into the very
early social platforms which form
the basis of internet culture.
So by the time
the rest of us join,
that is what- is what
it means to be online.
(ELECTRONIC CHIRPING)
WOMAN: What is
the Facebook exactly?
It's an online directory
that connects people
through universities and colleges
through their social networks there.
REPORTER: On college campuses,
it's called the Facebook trance.
To everyone else, it's spending too
much time in front of your computer.
MAX: The way the
platforms used to operate,
you would have a profile page and
you would look at your profile page,
you would look at other people's
profile pages and they were, um,
pretty boring.
(MOUSE CLICKING)
Then Facebook
introduced the News Feed.
We believe that the best
personalised newspaper
should have a broad
diversity of content.
And here is the new design.
MAX: Instead of just going to
people's individual profile pages,
there was going to be
one centralised home page
that each user would have,
and it would show
you all of the activity
from all of your
friends in the network.
Anytime they joined a group,
they posted something that
would show up on this feed.
REPORTER: It's designed for
the way that we're all sharing today,
and the trends that
we see going forward.
MAX: Almost immediately
after launching the News Feed,
it filled with these groups
expressing outrage about it.
Groups called Against News Feed,
I Hate Facebook,
I Hate News Feed,
Mark Zuckerberg
Turn Off News feed.
And every time someone
joins one of these groups,
it pushes it all over again to
everyone else's news feeds.
More and more users
started joining these groups,
maybe not even
because they felt that rage,
but just because they
see everyone else joining it.
All of a sudden, user time
exploded like 600 and 700% growth.
Mark Zuckerberg looked at this and
he looked at the engagement numbers,
how much more time people
were spending on Facebook,
ironically expressing
outrage at Facebook.
And he said, this is it.
This is the gold mine.
And he was absolutely right.
These social media platforms
that copied Facebook survived.
Every other social
network died out,
because this was the new way that
social media was going to operate.
As a young guy growing up,
every young boy wanted to be a
strong, tough, He-Man character.
And that was working
out, looking good on the TV,
flexing, pumping
weights and fighting.
To us, that was like
the ultimate man.
Andrew was a quiet,
tall kid. He was even shy.
Honestly, I didn't
think a lot of him.
(INDISTINCT ARENA CHATTER)
At first glance, a lot of the
guys look and size everyone up
and we thought, he looks
soft, you're going to beat him.
He was about 17/18 and
he was fighting grown men.
He had a lot of ba*ls.
When it's your first fight and
it's gruelling, you're in a cage,
it's locked.
Thousand people
screaming, smoky atmosphere.
Beers, people are a bit drunk.
Everyone's swearing.
"Get him up. Knock him out."
Scary.
And it was hard fight.
Andrew stuck in there.
(CHEERING, JEERING)
Some people can
not just function
9 to 5 office jobs, get
drunk at the weekends.
That is not for some
individuals and it's not for me.
So I have to find something which
keeps me physically tired enough
to stop me going AWOL.
And mentally tired enough.
And I've chosen fighting.
I think the only thing
that could stop me fighting
is if I had enough money to
constantly entertain myself.
Unless I'm a billionaire, I need
something that keeps me focused and
keeps me occupied in life because
I'm not built to live a normal existence.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
I knew he was good. I
knew it was making waves.
You know, there weren't many
people in England that, sort of,
became an
international level fighter.
So, yeah, you sort of definitely
sort of, yeah, he was going places.
I think it's his overall
character, fighting style.
I think yeah,
he's very different.
Hello, this is Andrew Tate.
I am the ISKA kick-boxing
world champion,
ISKA's world's most amazing
person, Enfusion finalist.
Funny, tall, muscly,
all around great guy.
Everyone loves me.
When I started my kickboxing
brand, I was living with fighters.
And Andrew was, sort of,
the big name on the circuit.
Because I'm one of the
best kickboxers in the world,
arguably the best,
especially in my own mind,
I would personally say that
I'm the best kickboxer ever,
Sidekick sponsor me... I
think he likes the sponsorships,
so it's a way of another reason
he could talk about himself.
And when I'm fighting, or
when I'm training, etcetera,
I use the equipment, I beat
everyone up and everyone thinks,
"Wow, Andrew's amazing, so we
need to try the same equipment."
I think he enjoyed, sort of
publicising himself, market himself.
Yeah, he just wanted to be
heard and I think he enjoyed it.
This is a magazine with me
on the front being amazing,
because I'm the best
kickboxer in the world.
He constantly just tries to
rub people up, you know,
I wanted that character
where a lot of other brands
probably wouldn't have
touched an Andrew Tate,
because I think it
could've been risky.
This is a world title,
and this means that I am
the best kickboxer in the world.
Now, because
I'm so f*cking cool,
I actually have two world
titles at two different weights.
So while you're best
in the world at nothing,
you're not even the best
in your town or anything,
I'm the best in
the world. Twice.
Andrew just wanted fame and
fortune. I think that's all he wanted.
You know, we all love money,
you know, and I think
Andrew wanted to just get rich.
You know, some of his fights he
might have been making five, ten
thousand pounds,
maybe a bit more.
You can only be fighting
a few times a year.
He was literally
fighting to earn.
You can't fight
forever, you know?
Hello, I'm Andrew
"King Cobra" Tate.
As you know, I'm
sponsored by Sidekick.
I am the four times...
Andrew started using
social media just for fun.
Two...
You know, I think he realised
he likes to sort of engaging,
people comment on it
and publicity, you know?
Yeah, but everyone liked the
likes back in them days, didn't they?
I find him funny, you know? I
don't think he had that many fans.
I know it seems like
a trivial thing to you,
as the world's most gorgeous
man, these things matter.
I don't know if I've upped
my beauty, if that's possible,
or slightly reduced my
beauty with my trampy beard.
(ELECTRONIC CHIRPING)
Around 2012, these social platforms
start undergoing this arms race for
who can get the most attention.
The owners of a small tech
company this morning are waking up
a billion dollars richer
than they were yesterday.
That's how much Facebook
is paying for Instagram.
Have you heard of it?
And that billion dollar price
tag puts it in a category that
makes it more valuable right
now than the New York Times,
Barnes and Noble.
Some of these companies that
we know much better as far...
The amount of human
attention is finite.
There are only so
many people in the world.
We only have so many
minutes in the day.
The social media companies,
they're competing against each other
for incremental seconds
and minutes of our attention.
They do it through the
development of these algorithms.
They start hiring up
all of the leading minds
and engineers in
artificial intelligence.
I'm Thomas Dimson. I
joined Instagram very early on.
There's like 15 engineers
responsible for 150 million people.
It's a product that is
growing out of control.
I introduced the Instagram
algorithm to change a platform
of hundreds of millions of people
from a completely chronological feed
to something where
the platform controls
the distribution of content.
What is an algorithm?
Algorithm, in computer
science, means a programme.
A programme that executes
something, basically,
a method of doing
something, a recipe.
In the context of social media,
the algorithms distribute
content on the network.
So I make a post, where
does it go? Who sees it?
It's like something
completely out of your control,
completely out of
your understanding.
Only the platform can
really understand it.
Both Twitter and Instagram
started with an algorithm
for distributing content,
but a very simple one.
Goes to your friends in the
order in which it was posted.
(TWITTER NOTIFICATION WHISTLE)
If you tweet something,
your friend follows you,
The moment you tweet, it's
going to be at the top of their feed.
What happens over time in
social media is that you start to get
a lot of non-friends
on these platforms.
Influencers, celebrities,
all this sort of stuff.
What is their incentive?
Their incentive is to post
all the time, because every
one of their followers will see
their post at the top of their feed.
They want as many people to
see their content as possible.
Everyone's trying
to game the system.
(ELECTRONIC CHIRPING)
It's making people have a
bad experience on the platform.
So you really have to take control
over distribution, as a platform.
It's like a must.
That's where machine learning
comes in. That's what it does.
It looks at content, looks at
behaviour, it looks at whatever,
and then makes a decision.
What you're
modelling is a human.
Human psychology. What
do people respond to?
Over time, they get more
and more machine learned,
more and more machine learned.
So a person has
less and less control.
The platform has
more and more control.
We start controlling
what you see.
The problem is what
people think they want
versus what people
respond to is different.
It's surprising how much you
can predict people's behaviour
that's going to be
a tabloid every time.
A. TATE: One... Two...
(BABY FUSSING)
MAN: Andrew! Come here, boy.
You're never too big for Daddy.
You come here to Daddy, boy.
I love my baby!
WOMAN: You were
so happy to be a daddy.
A. TATE: I was- I was
raised for competence,
and I was raised for
excellence. Come here, dude.
I'm named after my
dad with the same name,
Emory Andrew Tate.
He was a super unique individual,
it's hard for me to even explain.
You have to imagine a big,
physically dominating, dangerous guy
who's a chess genius.
When you're wired like
he is, everyone is a moron.
My father certainly had rage.
He got diagnosed with
narcissistic personality disorder,
and I do believe he had it.
He's also quite a morbid man.
He said, "Are you
prepared for my death?"
We were just like, "What?"
Like, he'd talk about dying,
he'd talk about me
being the oldest son,
he'd talk about me
having to carry the torch.
He's talking about my
responsibilities and duties.
He's talking about the
fact that I need to evolve
and be a better version of him.
He talked about these things a lot.
I knew I couldn't just
be some normal guy.
One...
COMMENTATOR: It's only
something about Andrew Tate.
Andrew Tate, arrogant.
He's brash. He's bold.
He knows what to expect.
Before influencer culture,
we had reality TV culture,
and that was how ordinary,
everyday people might seek fame.
By 2016,
reality TV was almost a
clear pathway to stardom.
I'm Andrew Tate,
I'm 29 years old
and I'm a four times
kickboxing world champion.
I see myself as
smarter than average.
I was a chess champion from a
very young age, from the age of three.
Everyone wants to be famous.
Everyone thinks that
becomes money and stuff.
He wanted to be famous.
He wants to be a celebrity.
Sometimes you're
shocked by what you see.
What people do to become famous.
MAN: You didn't even
tell us your f*cking name!
A. TATE: I have a reason.
So why don't you
sit down and shut up?
Alright, if that's
how you want to be...
Get a f*cking glove on
and go do the dishes, mate.
Make yourself useful in
this house or something.
If that's how you wanna
be it's your decision.
You haven't even said your
name! My name's Andrew.
To get chosen for Big
Brother, for our series in 2016,
88,000 people applied. 88,000.
So by the time you get to
actually get on Big Brother,
It means a lot, regardless of
whether they admit that or not.
(ARGUING OVER EACH OTHER)
Andrew caused absolute mayhem.
He fitted the villain
role, the headstrong role,
the role, "I really don't care what
you feel like or how you think."
Genuinely, eight of you
are the pissed off me.
I'm telling you, I'm
telling you what I've seen.
From what I've
seen, eight of you...
Snakes, you know,
snakes. Saying to someone...
I thought that a lot of viewers
would watch him and either love him
or hate him, but that didn't really matter
once they were speaking about him.
The certain things that I've
seen indicate a certain thing.
I know they're probably not
true. That's why I've said it.
That's why I've said it.
(ARGUING OVER EACH OTHER)
MAN: Chill out, man.
WOMAN: Yeah, it does...
I don't care if nobody
down there likes me.
I'm sure, by now, everyone's
already pre-decided they don't like me,
and that's fine. I know
where I genuinely am.
So I know I'm the most
intelligent person in this house.
I know the most capable
person in this house. Fact.
WOMAN: 'It's just,
it's so hard for us
just for you to come
in here and say that.'
I was instructed to
instil fear and paranoia.
I was here five minutes.
Fair enough. I took a b*llet
because I'm a man and I'm not afraid.
'I paid attention to who tried
to physically intimidate me
and who didn't. Who was...'
I mean, it's all very
dramatic, isn't it?.
I'm going to become the
most hated man in the world.
Makes sense, let's go.
(LAUGHS) He is psychic!
Wow!
Oh my God. (LAUGHS)
(SOFTLY) f*cking hell!
He didn't spend a lot of
time in the house at all.
And about 12 days into the show,
Big brother spoke on the
Tannoy, like, intercom speakers.
TANNOY: 'This is Big Brother.
Due to events in
the outside world,
Andrew has had to leave
the Big Brother house.'
(GASPING)
'His suitcases are
in the storeroom.
Would housemates collect
them, pack up his belongings
and return the cases to the
storeroom as soon as possible?'
That was it.
Oh my God, that's
the first one out!
First time I came
across him was 2016
when he got kicked
off Big Brother.
There was a kind of flurry of
newspaper articles about what
seemed to be this relatively
unsavoury character
engaging in violence
against women.
One has a video that
showed him hitting a woman.
I didn't say the word
"listen". Did I say "listen"?
Did I say listen? WOMAN: No.
Look at the camera.
Did I say "listen"?No!
Did I say (BLEEP) to you?
Did I say it?(SOBS) No!
Did I say it? (BELT CRACKS)
At the time, he was just one of
many stories of a reality TV star
doing something awful.
Why are you getting hit?
He offered a defence that many men
who engage in violence against women
seem to offer. This was
a consensual sexual act.
Yeah, it's just what we used
to do. It was just pure game.
He's a great guy. He
would never hurt anyone.
That was the first time that he
popped onto a kind of national
radar in the UK,
because it was widely
covered by the newspapers.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
Tate really does subscribe to
the idea that there is no such
thing as bad publicity.
He courts controversy.
He was already tapping into
his awareness that provocation
and outrage could
be a passport to fame.
This is the persona
that he's nurturing.
One that would eventually benefit
him greatly in the world of social media.
(ELECTRONIC CHIRPING)
You think of the internet
as forward looking, right?
You wouldn't think that the thing
that would come out of this would
be this super
traditionalist, regressive,
backward looking
sense of gender.
But the thing that, in a lot
of ways, drives social media
is niche communities and
subcultures organised around misogyny,
around conspiracy theories,
around hatred and fear of the other.
In 2014, a lot of these groups
started to come together into
its first big expression,
and that is the thing that we
ended up calling GamerGate.
GamerGate.
It's a story about sexism in
the world of video gaming,
with all the elements
of a Hollywood script.
An online hate mob
referred to as GamerGate.
This conspiracy theory, GamerGate,
said that video game developers
and video game journalists were
secretly in league with each other
to feminise video games,
and therefore to subjugate men
for whom this is one of the
last refuges of being real men.
REPORTER: What started as an online
spat about the ethics of gaming journalism
quickly escalated into
a full blown culture w*r.
Feminists in video games were
the big villains of the moment,
on social media, because users
felt like this was a safe space
for them that was being taken away.
Grab a wh*re and have a good time.
Let go of me! Please don't!
We really just want women
portrayed in a better way.
What we want is for women to
simply be portrayed as people.
We wanted some very common
sense reforms to include women and to
give us a fair shot at participating
in our field the way that men do.
But what happened was I became
the face of, like, the feminists.
"They're trying to come and
take over your video games."
Now the women calling for change in
this multibillion dollar virtual industry
are facing a very real
backlash, including death threats.
GamerGate was the start
of how we argue online.
We got r*pe
threats, death threats.
We had our careers
targeted, identity theft.
We really saw these dark
corners of the internet really
start to organise and focus
on taking people down.
REPORTER: The threats
came through a Twitter account
using the name Death to Brianna.
Tweeting out Brianna's
home address,
threatening to sexually
as*ault and then m*rder her.
I had people sh**ting videos,
wearing a skull mask and holding
a knife up to the camera,
talking about how they
were going to m*rder me.
They knew how to shut women up that
were saying things that they didn't like.
This was, swear to God, warfare.
REPORTER: Threats on
Twitter even forced Brianna Wu
to leave her Boston area home
after her address was made public.
I'll never forget this
until the day I die.
I get this anonymous
tweet and it says,
"Guess what, b*tch, I
know where you live."
It gives my home address.
It says, you know, "Your
dead mutilated corpse is
going to be on the front
page of Jezebel tomorrow.
There isn't jack sh*t
you can do about it.
If you have children,
they are going to die."
Why do you think there is such
a visceral response against you?
I think you're seeing
some very insecure guys,
like feeling very
threatened. And, you know,
lashing out at us,
being in their space.
(COMPUTER KEYS CLACKING)
The manosphere
is an umbrella term
for a collective of
misogynists online.
It started really as a place for
men to gather who were feeling
disenfranchised and really
evolved into splinter groups.
Incels, pickup artists,
men going their own way,
but aligned with the idea of
male victimhood and misogyny.
They're skanks.
(LAUGHS) I mean, that's what
they f*cking are. They're skanks.
Nobody gives a damn about men.
If you're a good looking guy,
you get to flirt all you want,
but if you're an ugly guy, you
don't get to ask anybody out.
If you're a seven or below,
you don't have any rights
under this new feminist agenda.
Come on, give me a break.
Some of these groups,
particularly the pick up artists,
were recommending quite
unscrupulous psychological means
of manipulating
women, of luring them in.
Give a girl four drinks, hit
her with some decent game,
have an apartment that is close
by and you have a winning formula,
OK, for banging a lot of girls.
A lot of the manosphere was
sharing ideas similar to this.
Also just hatred against women,
conspiracies that women were out
to get men, that men were
the real victims of society.
RECORDING: 'You are a
disposable tool for female enrichment.'
MAN: You know one of these.
(WHISTLES) You go to jail.
That's a three year felony.
A large number of people who've
engaged with that sort of content
genuinely do believe there was
a conspiracy around this world
that is designed to control
them, take away their freedom.
And of course, Andrew
Tate taps into that.
ANDREW TATE: It's gone so far
to the point where a
man can't yell at a woman.
That's domestic violence.
See, you can get in
the house to your girl
sucking your best friend's d*ck.
You can't scream at
her. You get arrested.
That's what they've done to men
now. That's the world we now live in.
It's 2015, he moves from
the UK out to Romania,
where he's making YouTube
videos, like The Hateful Tate stuff,
these ranting style videos that he
would produce on particular topics.
There are real role models
out there in the world.
There's real men out
there you should look up to
and you should respect.
The style he's trying to mimic
was that kind of YouTube style
which was quite
popular at the time.
I'm from the generation when
WWE was what everyone watched,
it was the thing. And
he just gave her a beer,
she doesn't like the beer.
He's like, "Have a beer."
She's like, "It doesn't
taste very nice."
Instead of going,
"Oh, I hope you're OK."
Stunner! Boom!
"What do you mean
you don't like the beer?"
Bang! Now you're
out cold, b*tch.
He's this relatively marginal
figure that's known a little bit
in the kickboxing world.
He's got some infamy
through the Big Brother period.
But he's not exploding on
social media at that stage.
You know what they should do?
You should have a
license to Facebook.
You have to apply
and prove you're not a
f*cking sh*t-munching dickhead.
He constantly jumps around,
looking around for what's
going to get the most traction.
The continuity is that he wants
to be rich. He wants to be famous.
He wants to be powerful.
f*ck the arts. The only art that
matters in this world is pimping,
and I've got a PHD.
Pimping Hoes Degree.
He would brag about
ostensibly owning the term pimp.
I don't think pimp
is a bad term.
And he had this camming
business, or this webcam business
where he would have young women
essentially engaging in sex work
on the internet for him, and he was
taking large chunks of the money.
WOMAN: The girls with the
Instagram pages featuring travel,
money, and experiences
are very often using a webcam
to achieve this lifestyle.
No-one really knows how much
money he was actually making.
It seems that he was
making lots of money,
but he constantly
lies about everything,
so it's very difficult to say.
But he was certainly making a
large amount of money from engaging
in various forms or getting
people to engage in various forms
of sex work for him. And not
only that, he says, if you follow me,
you can have exactly
the same thing.
Do what you want,
try not to get arrested,
make some cash and spend it,
cos soon you're going to be dead.
(UNCLEAR)
REPORTER: Gamergate.
It's a story about sexism in
the world of video gaming...
We take for granted that
social media is such a dark
and divisive force in our world,
it's easy to forget that
there was a time when...
there was a lot of optimism
around social media,
you know, it was
connecting humanity.
A way that you could
instantly connect
with something that was going
on on the other side of the world...
(CROWD CLAMOURING)
As a reporter writing
about international affairs
when social media first
got started, I loved it.
The Arab Spring in
2011 had been broadcast
and organised significantly
on Facebook and Twitter.
REPORTER: They
call it the Arab Spring.
Protests that began ten years ago
in Tunisia spread across the region.
REPORTER 2: The word of the
protests spread on Facebook and Twitter...
REPORTER 3: A sea of people,
as millions of Egyptians ended
a 30-year-old rule
with peaceful protests.
We saw its potential in the world,
and it's transformative. It's huge.
What we thought we had
was a version of social media
that was unadulterated,
that was really allowing
people to connect.
But that is not the
version of social media
that we are ever going to get,
because these are
publicly traded companies
and they have to follow
the incentives of the market,
which are to give us Andrew
Tates and not Arab Springs.
REPORTER: Tens of thousands
of people are waiting in line
across the country as Apple
releases the new iPhone 7 today.
(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)
Oh. (CHEERING)
Here we have the
brand-new iPhone 7!
Yeah.
Alright, alright.
Because social
media is free to use,
all of their money
comes from advertising.
And that means that their
overwhelming incentive
is to get you, the user,
to spend more time
on the platforms,
see more ads that they can
sell against your eyeballs.
To the platform, you know,
getting a lot of video plays
is worth a lot of money.
So in 2012 YouTube set
this goal for themselves:
they want to multiply the
amount of time that people spend
on their platform in the
aggregate, by a factor of ten.
They have 100 million hours
of daily watch time on YouTube,
and they want to
bring that up to a billion.
There is this YouTube engineer.
This guy named
Guillaume Chaslot,
who was really alarmed
by what he was seeing.
They were amping up this system
and making it more sophisticated
and more powerful at figuring
out what's going to make people
stay on the platform.
I'm Guillaume Chaslot,
I did a PhD in AI,
and when I worked at Google
in a project on YouTube
and advertisement.
I was a software engineer.
They want one billion
hours spent on YouTube.
They wanted it to
grow as fast as possible.
An AI is just an algorithm
that's quite complex,
but it has a very simple
goal. In case of YouTube,
your goal was just to
maximise watch time.
Rewind YouTube style.
YouTube is making
billions in revenue...
(GRUNTS)
..so even a tiny
increase over watch time
generates automatically
millions and millions per year.
Watch Next AI was
driving the traffic.
All the power is in the AI.
You have billions of
videos on YouTube.
The AI, out of this billion videos,
chooses 20 videos to show you.
The algorithm is
optimised for watch time.
People will spend more
time on the platform
have more watch
impact than other people.
So it means even a small community
that spends a massive amount of time
on the platform
can be recommended a lot by
the algorithm, because the algorithm
is going to try to convince other
people to join this community.
That's what happened with
flat-Earth conspiracy theory.
We don't think the world is
flat, we know that the world is flat
because it is the way...
It is a law, actually.
It's a law of physics. A
law of God, a law of nature.
Flat Earth is insanely stupid,
but the people who start to
believe in this conspiracy theory
start to spend a lot
of time on the platform,
because they believe
everybody else is lying to them.
Only YouTube tells the truth.
So they spend six, seven,
eight hours a day on YouTube,
watching more and more
videos, seeing the same thing.
The algorithm is like,
"Fantastic. This is a gold mine.
This is content
everybody should watch."
So the YouTube algorithm
recommended flat Earth
hundreds of millions of times.
It is a law, actually.
It's a law of physics.
It is a law, actually.
It's a law of physics.
(VOICE ECHOES)
For the algorithm,
it doesn't matter
if what you recommend
is true or not.
It doesn't care.
Obama and Hillary
both smell like sulphur.
There is a predator race,
which takes a reptilian form...
If we had statistics from YouTube,
we could actually have seen
these small conspiracies
becoming bigger and bigger,
but we don't.
I had concerns about the content
that I was seeing recommended.
People told me,
who am I to judge?
"If people watch
this, they like it."
But at some point you're responsible
of what you're recommending.
MAN: Everything's
politicised. Everyone's piling on.
They now say the American
flag needs to be banned...
MAN 2: ..humanity into a sl*ve
race. They demand human sacrifice.
They wanted to do to algorithms
that give more control to the user.
When I talked to my
boss about that, he said,
"I wouldn't work on this project if
I were you" in a kind of nice way
and kind of threatening
way in the same time.
And so for the next
few months, I stepped.
Then I started again.
One week later, I was fired.
If you look at what social media
was rewarding and incentivising
ten years ago,
all of it points to
someone like Andrew Tate.
Strap on an AK
47 and g*n down...
Deport, step up support...
..do whatever I can to
help save the high res.
The platforms take certain
aspects of human nature
and put a car battery to it.
Divisiveness, conflict,
tribalism, extremism,
outrage against social change.
There's this huge
community on social networks
with this sense of, we're going
to do something to fight back.
Well, I think the only card
she has is the woman's card.
She's got nothing else going.
And, frankly, if Hillary
Clinton were a man,
I don't think she'd
get 5% of the vote.
CROWD: (CHANTING) Lock her up!
2016 was a big wake
up moment for a lot of us,
because we all had
this vague sense
that Trump reflected
something about the social web.
A lot of the lies that he told
had proliferated on social media.
His style of politics had
been really successful there.
He had really not just
succeeded on the social platforms
but the social platforms
had given rise to something
really big and seismic.
Trump is an extension of
the exact same misogyny
and just raw anger
that formed Gamergate.
It is all the same
impulse that some people
belong in positions of
power and other people don't.
(APPLAUSE)
Hillary Clinton was the
Antichrist in these faces, right?
She's the final boss of
feminism that they wanted to stop.
That was, really, the
theme for that election.
Social security payroll
contribution will go up,
as will Donald's, assuming he
can't figure out how to get out of it.
But what we want
to do is to replenish...
Such a nasty woman.
..by making sure...
You can tie all of these events
that are happening in our democracy
in America, right
back to Gamergate.
Steve Bannon looked at Gamergate
and understood it was the
way to radicalise people.
Talk out his strategy to
get Trump elected, he said,
you bring them in through
Gamergate or something like it,
and you turn them on
to Trump and politics.
He understood that igniting people
over these cultural wedge issues
that threaten their identity,
you could then take them and
turn them into Trump supporters.
CROWD: (CHANTING) USA!
REPORTER: There was
an almost surreal quality
to Donald Trump's victory.
A billionaire businessman turned
champion of the working people,
sweeping to power, stunning
the nation and the world.
The fact that I have such power
in terms of numbers with
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc,
I think it helped me win.
Make America Great
Again is not that different
to Make Video Games
Great Again, right?
It's this really
regressive ideology,
"Let's go backwards,
let's protect this.
Let's stop these people
that don't respect us enough."
MAX: It is very easy to
dismiss Donald Trump
as just this reality TV star who
had managed to get a weird,
super engaged
social media fandom.
What a lot of us realise is that
through the power of these platforms
and the people who have
learned how to manipulate them,
those online niche
communities really can be used
in ways that can
steer elections,
even help elect a president.
JOE: By 2017, social media
has almost become ubiquitous,
especially for
younger audiences.
Vast numbers of users across
a range of mainstream platforms
is having a massive
influence on societal debates.
MAX: Social media
companies marketed themselves
like this is the new
digital civilisation.
This is where humanity happens.
The home of all politics,
all human interaction.
And now everything can
happen through a social platform.
And it really does change a lot.
For example, in 2017 you
have the MeToo movement.
The huge moment which showed
that things that rise on social media
that are driven by its users
can bring real political change,
can really change society.
The way the hashtag
exploded on Twitter
shows us that, while we
all thought we were alone,
we're not.
But also what happens as
part of that is some people,
like Andrew Tate, learn
that they can exploit that
and kind of hook onto
that for their own benefit.
New York Times reported today
Weinstein is accused of sexually
harassing female employees
and actors for decades.
In the wake of the
MeToo movement
and the allegations
against Harvey Weinstein,
Andrew Tate tweeted that
women should bear responsibility
for being r*ped.
He is stoking controversy.
He is taking up the mantle
of being a provocateur.
He's saying, "I'm
speaking truth to power."
Of course, this is just a
tactic to gain attention.
And it worked.
In some senses,
Tate's message
kind of comes of age
through that Me Too period.
He'll find there is an audience.
It might not be a kind
of massive audience,
but it's an audience that's
going to be really receptive
to his kind of
hypermasculine, no apologies,
misogyny-style content.
There is an audience of
angry young men on the internet
that want to consume
that, no doubt he sees that.
My name is Joule.
Online, I was known as the
Sartorial sh**ter until I was doxed,
so now I can
actually use my name.
I'd say outside of the family, I'm
the one who spent the most time
with him, hundreds of
times over the last five years.
When I met them in 2018, they
wanted a bit more professional image.
He'd left the West. He
was living in Romania.
They were living
a pretty good life.
The cars, the mountains,
the food, you know,
attractive ladies everywhere.
I said, "I have weapons and
tactics training company in Ukraine.
Would you like to come and train?
Pretty much instantly said yes, yes.
So the weapons here, you
can get comfortable c*ck it.
Obviously I'll do it, but it doesn't
go off unless it's popped, right?
Yeah, but it will be...
We trained together
for three days.
We started talking about the world.
He said, in the West, at the moment,
you can see the way the relationship
between a man and a woman
is being interrupted,
traditional dynamics
are being effectively
suppressed and labelled as bad,
and that's impacting the
way relationships are formed,
which then impacts the
way children are raised.
On the macro level, that
impacts society as a whole.
We're seeing some
sort of moral decline
or some sort of breakdown
of values in the West.
He was saying the
West is a failed society.
To be honest, I'm
inclined to agree with him.
You could even argue that
most of the masculine role models
have been purged
from modern day culture.
We don't have our old
school cowboys anymore.
We don't have those
gruff masculine figures.
And so I believe a lot
of young men are looking
for that masculine guidance.
Tate definitely delivers on that.
I said, guys, I think you've
got a very important message
to get out to the world, and I'd
love to support you however I can.
RICHARD: Men like Andrew
Tate are trying to model
a certain kind of masculinity.
In his case, of course, a very
misogynist brand of masculinity.
And there are millions
of boys and young men
who don't have a great
answer to the question of like,
what does it mean to be a man
today? What does it mean to grow up?
What does mature
masculinity look like?
How do I go from being a boy to a
man? What am I supposed to do?
MAN: Andrew! You ain't never...
The most vulnerable boys
and the most vulnerable men
are the ones who've
had difficult childhoods.
WOMAN: You were so
happy to beat your daddy? Yes.
I think it's inevitable if
you've had something of
a broken set of models
of masculinity yourself,
then of course
you're on a search,
of course you're
desperately searching,
and longing, in some ways.
The script has been torn
up, to a very large extent,
for both men and women, but
we've replaced the script for women
and said it's all about
empowerment and independence,
and "You go girl," etc.
And, I mean, it still moves me
that that's changed so quickly,
but what are we saying to boys now?
We're kind of just
leaving them to it.
That's not a great recipe
because they then go online.
How to be a man. What am I
supposed to do? How do I get a date?
How do I get a girlfriend?
How do I make money?
Actually, what
they're really asking is,
"Who the hell am
I supposed to be?"
HADEN: Thing that I think about
being a man, a true masculine man,
the number one thing is duty.
It's your duty to
protect your woman.
It's your duty to take
care of your family.
It's your duty to
provide for your family.
It's your duty to be a
good man to your wife.
It's your duty to be
good to your parents.
There's so many duties
that we have as a man.
ARHAM: I feel like society
downplays how difficult it is to be a man.
And I say this as a man who
has experienced adversity.
Men are often unable
to reach out for help.
Your mentality of growing up
into being a man is telling you
a certain way to live,
but then the world is telling you
that that way of living is wrong,
or the way you think is wrong,
or you not calling somebody
by their proper pronoun
or something is just wrong.
I'm surprised of women's
silence on a lot of the issues
that are going on, as far
as masculinity and stuff.
What we started to understand
was that for some young men,
anti feminism and
anti-women politics
was a route into
broader, far-right politics.
Andrew Tate understood
the power of that.
Social media opened up
unprecedented audiences to individuals
that wanted to push
the politics of hate.
Now, at the click of a button,
someone could be sat in a bedroom
in London and 24 hours a day
find bits of information
which suits their worldview,
that incenses them.
You could see individuals
radicalising down these pathways,
down these rabbit holes.
And some of this was
happening very, very quickly.
Hope Not Hate's job is to
monitor the far right primarily,
and in 2019, there was a
number of things that happened
that made Andrew Tate
really come onto our radar
as a figure that we
needed to look at.
He turns up in America at
a conference called CPAC.
It is kind of a conservative
political conference
that has long attracted
numerous far-right figures
from around the world.
(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)
How social media was developed,
these individuals have been
very, very quick to try and use it.
By that time, Andrew
Tate's not putting out
a huge amount of content online.
He's got a few little
things here and there.
He had a very small footprint,
but then it pops up in
these photographs at CPAC.
In those photographs, he was
hanging around with people that
we'd long been looking at in
terms of far-right extremists,
conspiracy theorists
like Paul Joseph Watson,
American figures
like Jack Posobiec.
He talked positively
around Alex Jones,
the very high-profile
conspiracy theorist.
He was photographed
next to Nigel Farage,
and all of a sudden it was
very, very clear this was a figure
that was no longer just an
individual that clearly engaged
in terrible behaviour previously,
and got kicked off a TV show.
He was starting to build networks
in a much more extreme world.
I'm here with the man,
Andrew Tate, Cobra Tate.
Thanks for coming out, man.I have
Andrew Cobra Tate with me today,
who is...He was put on loads
of podcasts by far-right figures
and social media influencers because
he said extreme and wild things,
that they thought was entertaining
and was going to get them views.
Well, listen, I don't know if
anyone here knows who you are.
I know you're kind of, I'd
like to say up and coming.
I mean, you got 20,000...
He starts to give these
really, really extreme,
almost peculiar interviews.
I can't think of any socio dynamic, I
can think of any business dynamic,
of any dynamic on Earth that's
better with a female charge.
Yep. This is reality.I agree.
He was talking about
ownership of women.
He was talking about violence
against women, hitting women,
strangling women.
He was willing to say
whatever it took,
whenever it took
to whatever audience he
felt was most likely to get him
what he wanted. Getting
the girl, f*cking the girl
is the first 10% of the game.
Having a girl tattoo your
name on you, on her...
Yeah. ..it's other 90%.
How many girls have
your name on them?
22. I'm on 22.
22, oh, man...
This is a technique that's
being used across these groups,
appearing on each
other's podcasts,
helping to bolster
each other's followings
by a sort of cross-promotional,
almost a sort of cross-pollination
of each other's content.
The only happy relationship
that can possibly exist
is with a man leading
and a man in charge.
Any other relationship
is always misery.
They're using each other
for their own financial gain,
for their own fame, for
their own betterment.
And it becomes
an entire network,
an entire ecosystem of
very dangerous views.
Andrew, great to have
you on. It's good to be here.
That's a cool place you're in. That
looks like a major chick magnet.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm out
here in Romania at the moment,
which is pretty much...The
women ain't bad-looking in Romania!
They're not bad. No,
they're not bad.(LAUGHS)
JOE: Things start to
shift gear from there,
he took his hateful misogyny
and he tailored it to an audience.
He pulls in the sex, he pulls
in the aspirational lifestyle,
uses the techniques of
the influencer communities
around the world. And he
speaks without any filters.
Man, look at history.
Name a powerful alpha from history
who didn't have more than one wife.
JOULE: Tate's focus was finding
ways to make money online.
He was very active in
building certain online products
and selling those,
and that then led into building the
community that is the w*r Room.
INTERVIEWER: Why
is it called the w*r room?
I'm not sure. (LAUGHS)
That's a good question.
I think a more
accurate title would be,
"Arguably the most
powerful community of men
striving for masculine
excellence every single day."
But it's hard to put that
on a website. Right?
So I guess they
chose the w*r Room.
The driving intent behind
the w*r Room was,
"We really value our brotherhood,
but we can't find anyone else."
The Tate brand was
then put out as a filter
for men who perhaps also
wanted the traditional values,
also wanted that maximum
conquest, building businesses,
training, pushing for growth
and for evolution every day.
Tate does put forward solutions.
Get brothers around you,
get your money right,
get your fitness right,
work endlessly to improve
your life through attaining
masculine excellence
in all realms.
HARRIET: He is identified what
he sees as a gap in the market.
He's saying to men, "Nobody's
listening to you, but I am,
and here's how I can
help you be successful."
He's selling courses online,
ultimately selling
a sexist agenda.
Welcome to the Tate PHD
Course. If you bought this course,
which you have, congratulations.
You're going to change
your life for the better.
I know exactly what I'm talking
about. I'm f*cking certified.
One of Andrew Tate's courses
was called a PhD course,
which was the
Pimping Hoes Degree.
A lot of people ask me, what do
you do when your girl does this?
What do you do when a girl does-
Almost, like, how do you
discipline your female?
I'll tell you now.
Women only give a
sh*t about one thing.
Attention.
In it, we really see him encouraging
men to adopt very unscrupulous,
manipulative
psychological methods
in a style of advice that some
might consider to be grooming.
You promise them you'll take them
to f*cking Thailand or Bora Bora
or wherever at
the end of the year,
and we'll live together happily
ever after. This is amazing.
Promise dreams, sell dreams.
Tate's adopting this
idea of being a pimp,
or promoting himself as a pimp.
And, of course, pimping is
ill*gal and it's exploiting women.
I take all the money from
all my girls. I take it all.
I pay fractions to them.
Andrew Tate is a character
rising up and saying, "I'm famous.
I have all these women,
I have all this money.
All you need to
do is listen to me."
Dark hair b*tch, f*ck...
So then it's not about me,
then it's about THEM
losing to other women
cos there's more of you everywhere,
half of the world are women.
Go to the f*cking
gym. Get built.
You're built, you
don't need fashion.
..looks like you!
I'll close my eyes. I'll f*ck a
b*tch who looks nothing like you
with my eyes closed and
pretend it's you. I don't care!
REPORTER: Hospitals
are reaching full capacity.
Intensive care units in more than
50 Florida hospitals are now full.
BORIS JOHNSON: To stop the
disease spreading, you must stay at home.
RICHARD: Covid was
just bad for everybody.
It was just a crazy,
chaotic, damaging mess.
We've got a minute on the clock.
(APPLAUSE)
But it was a bit of an echoing
silence around the real issues
that boys and men were facing.
In some ways, the pandemic
was a compression in time
of some of the trends
that we're generally seeing
with boys and young men,
which is more time online,
more social isolation,
struggling in education.
So that creates very fertile
territory for people like Tate
to come in and
say, "I understand it,
here's my solution."
They've taken what are legitimate
problems with a lot of men,
boys and men, and they've
turned them into grievances,
which they're
then able to exploit.
I don't follow blind rules.
These rules are not about safety.
I've had enough of this sh*t.
Damn.
Andrew Tate taps into this
idea that there is a secret,
powerful elite
controlling their lives.
In his case, he's the one
that's managed to break free.
You're not wearing a mask.
We're anti-mask.
We are on the Romanian moon,
we're throwing a party during
Covid, after they specifically told him...
He flips and flops between
the platforms, attempting to
both mimic the style of
those platforms, but also mimic
the messaging that he thinks he
can expand his audience through.
What he manages to
eventually stumble across
is a formula that
is the perfect storm.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
TikTok started to emerge
around 2018 and 2019,
but it wasn't until the
pandemic and lockdowns
that people really started
downloading it in a huge way,
and it really blew up as the sort
of main social media platform,
particularly for young
people and teenagers.
TikTok is the latest app to
capture the attention of teens
and young adults
across the world.
A TikTok is all
about fun and money.
Eyeballs bring money.
People were learning
dance routines.
It was fun. It was addictive.
MAX: TikTok
functions on algorithms,
just like the other platforms,
and it turns on the exact
same human frailties.
But it is much more
algorithmically-focused.
TikTok is pure algorithm.
All it does is show you
video and then learn from that
what you spend time on,
what you don't spend time on.
It is just laser-focused on
your, like, monkey brain.
And it loves to show you
the same types of content
over and over and over again.
MAN: (ON VIDEO)
Oh! What the f*ck?
JOE: TikTok is the perfect
platform for Andrew Tate.
Men have never
been faithful. Ever.
Look at history. Every single...
If you track Andrew
Tate on social media
Tate blips when
he's on Big Brother,
and he tries to break through
a little bit on social media.
Then there's another blip
when he starts talking about
some of the MeToo content,
but he remains relatively irrelevant
until you see this meteoric
rise through the TikTok period.
The kind of history of social media
and the history of Andrew Tate
collide in that moment.
The most beautiful women, on
average, have slept with less men
than an average chick.
JOULE: Tate's goal was to blow
up. To master the attention economy.
He knows how to bring in attention
through saying things that are...
things that get a reaction.
That's a conscious strategy.
Become Hustlers University.
Welcome to the metaverse.
Inject it into your brain.
And if you only exist
amongst the money...
you're going to end
up with some money.
Welcome to the
Hustlers University.
Early 2022 we start
to hear increasingly
about this thing called
the Hustlers University.
He bragged it was the largest
online university in the world.
It's a very broad use
of the term 'university'.
And when you are in this online
space, there was various courses.
You're supposed to be
lectured by millionaires.
Whatever it was, there
was a big chunk of it
about an affiliate
marketing scheme.
And by that, what I mean is,
if you've got people to sign
up to Hustlers University,
you got, I think, 48%
of their sign up fee.
This became the mechanism
and the means by which his content
is spread vastly across all various
forms of social media platforms.
If you take these long form
interviews that he's giving
on podcasts, on YouTube...
MAN: And then just adjust this.
..and you clip it up into
hundreds of little clips of him
saying the most extreme stuff
that's going to get the most traction...
Then on the bottom bit of that
you put a link to Hustlers University,
people click on that content
and you get some money back.
If you're a girl that
everyone's had...
This is the engine which
explodes him on TikTok.
..she likes? She's not
allowed to like things.
Her opinions are invalid. She's
a female. She's barely sentient.
She can't think for herself.
You're supposed to think for her.
Just to come along and
say... (DIALOGUE FADES)
There's multiple days where I
would just sit there and scroll,
and then I'll get three Andrew Tate
videos and then some stupid video,
then three Andrew Tate videos
and then some stupid video.
You know, it just
sounded like... an old me.
It was refreshing to hear these
things being said and stuff again.
And it's just like,
"OK, you know,
masculinity is coming
back or trying to."
So, I figured I'd
give him a push
and try to listen to
everything that he said.
He represents a lifestyle that
any young man would want to have.
And he shows you how you can
get that through discipline, hard work.
Everybody was trying to
tell me I should hate him.
And it was hard
for me to hate him.
So I was trying to find a way
like, "Should I really hate this guy?"
And I don't hate
him, so. (CHUCKLES)
So I put a plan together to
conquer TikTok four months ago.
Yeah.And I've now
completed my conquest.
Yeah. So, bro, done.
So I conquered TikTok faster than
the nation states conquer countries.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
It became impossible to
open up a social media app,
any of the major platforms,
and not come across this content.
Not because you wanted to, but
because it was served up to you.
I would never let a
woman pay for a bill.
By that summer we're talking
over 12 billion views of content
that's related to Tate.
TATE: This new idea that
men and women are the same
is complete garbage
that's been invented, right?
CHLOE: I was in the
garden with my two boys.
One was just pre-teen
and one was a teenager.
They said something that
was a bit odd about girls
and I obviously questioned
it. I'm sure that it was, like,
a derogatory sort of
'female' kind of slang,
and I just didn't understand
where it had came from.
They mentioned Andrew
Tate, so we Googled him.
I'd never heard of him before.
(HIP-HOP MUSIC)
I really didn't think that anyone
would take him seriously,
it was so kind of cringy.
I was quite dismissive.
But then in school, I noticed a
change in the boys' vocabulary,
like misogyny,
patriarchy, chauvinism.
You know, in my 20-year career,
I'd never really heard teenage
boys being at ease with these words.
It really kind of surprised me.
One level, I was pleased
that they had the vocabulary,
but I didn't know
where it had came from.
I was asked, "Does your
husband let you go to work?"
No-one had ever
asked me that before.
A student asked
about my body count.
Now, obviously that's an
inappropriate question to ask.
And they know it's an
inappropriate question to ask.
There was a certain kind
of verbally aggressive tone
that was very Andrew Tate.
It definitely seems
like a regression.
You know, noticeable change in
the ways that boys talked about girls.
It's completely wrong
to dismiss him as a joke
because he's not a
joke. He's a real threat.
TATE: I'll never look at a beautiful
woman who does everything I say
and go, "You know what?
You do too much of what I say,
I'm gonna go get some
disagreeable b*tch."
The way that he
relates to humanity,
that makes him really
dangerous to young people.
I conquered the internet,
hundreds of millions of dollars,
four times kickboxing
world champion, 27 cars,
properties across the world.
MAX: Our brains evolved
to have social feedback
from like 10 to
20 people at most.
Social platforms deliver a
very, different kind of feedback
on a much, much larger scale.
and they push you
very, very deliberately
towards certain emotions,
certain social feedbacks
that do change how people behave
and change how we feel and how we act.
REPORTER 1: On social
media there's growing concern
that constant online interaction
can affect attention spans...
REPORTER 2: Social media and
the internet is part of everyday life
for children and teenagers.
REPORTER: The coroner
said 14-year-old Molly Russell
died from an act of self-harm
while suffering from depression
and the negative
effects of online content.
When you're on social media,
you're not the customer...
..you're the product.
They are selling your
engagement to advertisers,
and they're selling your
user data to advertisers.
So they have a direct and
palpable economic incentive
to maximise the
engagement of every user.
Not by showing them
what they want to see,
but by showing them what
they can't look away from.
Kids are particularly vulnerable,
both to become addicted to
social media, but also to
have bad judgment regarding
what they do on social media.
And then overreact emotionally
to adverse consequences
on social media.
So, it's a perfect storm.
We filed our first case
in January of 2022
and it involved
Selena Rodriguez,
an 11-year-old girl who took
her life and filmed it on Snapchat.
She was a child that was so
addicted to social media that
she broke her sister's nose when
they tried to take her phone away.
ANNOUNCER: Breaking news, at
least ten people dead in a mass sh**ting
at a supermarket in Buffalo.
ANNOUNCER 2: The sh**ter was
heavily armed and had tactical gear
and a tactical helmet on.
ANNOUNCER 3: According to the
lawsuit, the sh**ter was radicalised
by algorithms on the social
media sites that he used,
which fed him, and I'm quoting
here, "increasingly r*cist,
anti-Semitic and
violence-inducing content."
Payton Gendron was targeted
with artificial intelligence
on a number of platforms,
including YouTube.
In order to maintain
his engagement
they sent him down a rabbit hole of
it showing him increasingly radical,
r*cist, anti-Semitic material.
The social media companies
have designed products
to maximise engagement.
They are unsafe when
they're used as intended
because the use is
predictable and designed into it.
There's no mistake. There's no
mystery. There's no coincidence.
This was foreseeable. We
knew this was going to happen,
but there was so much money to
be made that they kept making it.
And they kept doing it,
even though they knew that
these kinds of situations would keep
occurring again and again and again.
JOE: I think the best way
to understand the impact
of people that create
harmful and pernicious content
is often very, very difficult
to turn around and say,
"This person that went off and
did something awful in the real world
is purely indirectly responsible
Back to Andrew Tate," for example.
But what they do is Andrew
Tate, and content creators like him,
they create a swamp of content which
is pernicious and nasty and hateful.
And out of that swamp
will emerge mosquitoes
which go off and
do individual things.
He's fundamental to creating
a kind of ecosystem online,
where individuals
consume harmful content,
over which he cannot
control what they go and do.
But those mosquitoes
emerge out of that swamp,
and some of them go
off and do terrible things.
ANNOUNCER: Research shining a light
on the dark underside of social media.
Connecting and promoting
a network of accounts
dedicated to
underage sex content.
WOMAN: They were touching my
upper and middle portion of my avatar.
He said things like, "Don't
pretend you don't love it.
TATE: Feminists who
hate us and call us toxic,
the second they have trouble,
they'll call a police officer.
ANNOUNCER 2: Lost control of the amount
of time that youngsters spend online.
TATE: Women need
to respect you as a man.
How's a woman gonna respect
you if no other girl wants you?
They all had 100 wives, bunch of
children. Big G, conquers the world.
Normal. That's normal
evolutionary biology.
That's how men
are designed to be.
Deplatforming is a tactic
we try to use quite sparingly
at Hope Not Hate. It's
based on the understanding
that certain individuals
engage in behaviour
that is so harmful and toxic it
has a real effect, both on society,
but also on the online
spaces in which they're active.
The other big line is
whether or not we think
it's going to have a really
negative effect on society.
And Andrew Tate just
increasingly ticked each box.
His content was breaking
the terms of service
of all of the major
social media platforms.
And yet, the platforms
weren't acting.
It's bang, out the
machete, boom, in her face,
and grip her up by the
neck, "Shut up, b*tch!"
We watched everything
we could get our hands on.
Spent time in Hustlers University
online to try and better understand
the mechanisms of what he was
doing in terms of money-making,
and we brought that research
together and we produced a report.
It was clear that this was
something that had broken out
of the confines of
marginal online spaces
and was having a genuine
effect on young people.
We go to the tech platforms. We
send them our research and say,
"Essentially, here's an
opportunity to do the right thing."
In a matter of days, we see
YouTube remove his account.
Instagram, Facebook.
It's all starting to look good.
TikTok act very, very slowly,
become very, very aggressive with us,
but eventually claim that they
have also removed an account.
Andrew Tate has been banned
from Facebook and Instagram
for violating its policies
around dangerous individuals.
What you start to see is
probably the most successful
deplatforming campaign we'd ever
been involved in at Hope Not Hate.
HARRIET: Shortly after
Tate had been deplatformed,
we approached
Tate for a comment.
And he was very
keen to be interviewed.
We debated long and
hard about whether
we might be inadvertently
providing another platform for him
to share his insidious views,
but ultimately, this was a
man that had global notoriety.
We spoke over Zoom in
the summer of August 2022.
During a conversation,
he describes
his content being
taken out of context.
And when I asked him
to provide the context,
he actually doubled
down on this.
He said, "I agree with
everything I've ever said.
I stand by everything
I've ever said."
Deplatforming is not a silver
b*llet and never has been.
For a very, very short moment
it felt like a great success.
It felt like, actually, the
platform was publicly pressured
into doing something
really positive, and we felt
it was going to have a real long
term effect on his appeal online.
Sadly, that didn't
turn out to be the case.
PRODUCER: No. No.(LAUGHTER)
Oh, you banned me
from Instagram, did you?
I'm still on a private
jet, mother f*ck.
I'm still travelling the
world. I'm still top G.
Think you can ban
me, you can't ban me.
I'm back with a vengeance.
The matrix can't defeat me.
Previously, you'd remove
a really harmful figure
and they would end up
on an alternative platform,
Getta or Gab, speaking
to tiny audiences.
He was removed from YouTube,
Facebook and Instagram,
and he was talking about things
on vast international TV shows.
PIERS MORGAN: He's the most
famous man you probably never heard of
with billions of views online.
This was a challenge those of
us that engage in campaigning
for deplatforming
hadn't faced before.
Well, welcome first of all,
you come all the way from
Romania to do this interview.Correct.
What do you hope to achieve from
this interview? Why are you here?
It'd be interesting to have
a conversation with you.
You've certainly
been the subject
of your own divided opinions in
the world. There's a lot of people
who would say some of the things
you say are perhaps dangerous or toxic.
I thought you'd be a good
person to speak to on this subject.
He starts to use mainstream media,
use these major global platforms
that he's given to launder
his reputation again
to a global audience.
I don't hate women
in any regard.
I have no negative relationship with
women. No women have come forward
saying I've hurt them. I've no
criminal record against women.
I think r*pe is disgusting. I'd
take a stronger stance on r*pe
than the British government. I think
they should face the death penalty.
And then that clip is
back on social media,
and all of a sudden you can
watch him again on social media,
despite his own
platform being removed.
I will say that I am
sorry that offends you.
However, there's a large contingent of
the world- That doesn't mean you're sorry.
I'm not sorry, that's my
point. Please don't interrupt.
I know why you're good at your
job. First you interrupt people a lot,
which is a good skill-
(OVERLAPPING CHATTER)
You're proving me right, the timing
is good. The other thing you do...
Every time he's caught and he
gets in trouble he reinvents himself
in a different way, a way he
hopes will allow him to get sympathy.
He tapped into an
existing culture w*r.
And took himself from an
individual that was rightly removed
for engaging in awful
and dangerous behaviour,
into an individual that was being
persecuted for telling the truth.
So, they're scared
of men, free-thinking,
and they're scared of
young men free-thinking.
And my fans are young,
military age males,
and I teach them to free
think. So they look at me
and they literally see me
as a threat to the world.
And that's why... I think
they're going to try and k*ll me.
And I think this is one of
our last chances to fight.
And I think it's a battle
of good versus evil,
genuinely God
against the demons.
(DOOR KNOCK)
ANNOUNCER 1: The social
media personality Andrew Tate,
alongside his brother
Tristan, have been arrested
on suspicion of human
trafficking and r*pe.
ANNOUNCER 2: Widely regarded as
one of the most famous people online.
He's grown his profile
through misogynistic,
r*cist and h*m*
commentary.
It seemed pretty obvious to lots
of people that someone that had
this attitude towards women, that
bragged about certain behaviours
and certain things that
he'd even done himself,
that at some point there needs
to be consequences for that.
But I don't think anyone
realised quite how extreme
some of the charges would be and
how many victims would come forward.
He's now been charged
and is awaiting trial for r*pe,
human trafficking, and forming
an organised crime group
designed to exploit women.
The matrix has attacked me.
He's innocent until proven guilty.
This has to go through the courts.
But this is not the
way he spun it online,
which is, this is a
matrix attack against him
because he said some
nasty things on social media.
He's told his supporters that he's
being dragged through the mud
because he got some
women some views on TikTok,
and that's just
absolutely not the truth.
God knows the truth.
There's no evidence in my file.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTS)
Everybody knows I'm innocent.
That's OK. Everyone knows.
JOE: The thing that I think was
so depressing was how many
of his supporters responded
in a way that's just exactly
as he would have wanted them
to and said, "This can't be true."
When you look back now at
the content that he produced
over a number of years prior
to his arrest, it seems pretty
clear that he's inoculating his
audience against what's coming.
First you get cancelled. Then they
make up a reason to put you in jail.
And if that fails,
they k*ll you.
He is pre-loading his
audience with all the arguments
that they need to defend
him when he gets arrested.
Oh, yeah. Mainstream media.
Oh, sh*t. I'll just put
it simple like this.
They tell you what to think,
and they control why you think it.
For sure Tate has
brainwashed me.
But do you accept your
brainwashing? You know?
I appreciate more of
his brainwashing than...
..than stuff my mom
has told me for years.
That's just a problem
with the world.
They don't want these
aspirations right now. They don't.
You know, they've basically
k*lled off all of our great leaders
and imprisoned the rest in...
propaganda, the
few remaining left.
If he ends up in prison
for a long period of time
and he doesn't have
access to social media.
A lot of these
movements move on.
But over 90-odd percent of
young men know who he is,
and 50% of those
people agree with him.
The impact of this, what's
happening right now,
will not just end the moment he
gets rid of his social media accounts,
or he becomes an irrelevance.
He'll inculcate people
with views about women
that will last some of
those people decades,
and there's ramifications will
go on for a long period of time.
(OMINOUS MUSIC STING)
ANNOUNCER 1: Widely regarded as
one of the most famous people online.
MAN: A TikTok is all
about fun and money.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
ZUCKERBERG: Facebook
has become less about colleges
and more about
sharing lots of content
with different groups of people.
When people share more, the world
becomes more open and connected.
And in a more open world,
many of the biggest problems
we face together will
become easier to solve.
MAX: There was this line that Mark
Zuckerberg used to use all the time.
He said, "We are
fundamentally rewiring the world
from the ground up."
This belief...
that we, Silicon Valley,
are going to end the
old ways as we know it
and replace it with this new,
pure civilisation of the mind.
(CHUCKLES) We get
a lot of feedback saying,
like, how much
people love the site.
So, how did we get
to where we are now?
A very different and
a much darker place.
The companies, at this point,
they don't have naivete
as an excuse anymore.
They don't have, "we don't know.
We were just 22-year-old dropouts."
They're grown ups now. They
know what the platforms do.
They understand the
effect that it has on its users
and it has on our
politics and our societies.
And they are choosing that.
MAN: 37% of teenage
girls were exposed
to unwanted nudity in
a week on Instagram.
You knew about
it, who was fired?
Senator, this is why we're
building- Who did you fire?
Senator, that's not-
That's- Who did you fire?
Um, I'm not gonna answer that.
There's families of
victims here today.
Have you apologised
to the victims?
Would you like to do so now? They're
here. You're on national television.
Would you like now to apologise to
the victims who have been harmed-
Show the pictures.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
I think a lot of social media
engineers do believe that
they are just reflecting our
own psychology back to us,
and there is a
lot of truth to that.
These tendencies don't
come from nowhere.
(CHUCKLES) But it is still true
and has been demonstrated
over and over again,
including by the researchers
within these companies,
that their platforms
dramatically exacerbate
and amplify these
worst tendencies.
THOMAS: I ran one of the
largest experiments ever run,
which was to change a platform
of hundreds of millions of people
from a completely
chronological feed
to something where
the platform controls
the distribution of content.
It was, like, a very radical
change to a lot of people all at once.
And so there's just a lot
to understand about that.
But yeah...
I hope I'm not come
across cold. (CHUCKLES)
I mean, truly, like, weird
times, strange things.
And, you know, in some ways,
I'm still thinking about things
that were happening there
and not with regret, but
with, like, maybe sober mind.
It's like, "Oh."
It's strange to think about myself
being there and involved in them.
Being able to flip a switch
that affects 300 million
or 400 million people.
It's not- I don't think I
even- Yeah, it's just hard.
Hard to comprehend
what that means.
It's a very weird feeling
to have had a lot of impact,
but not knowing if this
impact was good or bad.
It's a bit overwhelming when
you when you think about that.
So you prefer, naturally,
you prefer not to think about it.
MAX: Now we have AI and we know
that it is going to be transformative.
For example, what
would it be like if...
we had another
Microsoft Tay today?
That chat bot that Microsoft
developed back in 2016
that went haywire and started
sending r*cist, crazy tweets.
You really just have to look
at someone like Andrew Tate,
someone who has already
decided that they want to optimise
for whatever the platform
wants them to optimise for.
And the only difference is
they would probably look
more realistically human.
And there's going to
be a lot more of them.
It wouldn't surprise me if
somebody was already doing it
and we just didn't know.
People ask me, aren't you
worried that AI in social media
could change our
politics and our society?
It's already happening. Social
media is already doing that.
And so it's... you
know, it's too late.
It's like a handful... companies
that are deciding literally
where the world is going.
And when you ask
them, "Hey, can you...
can you let me...
see where the world is going?"
And they're like, "No, no, no,
this is our private information.
No, you can't have
access to this information."
That's, for me, is
absolutely insane.
I don't want to sound like
a, kind of, Luddite and say
that we should get
rid of all this stuff
and only talk about
the terrifying things.
There's no doubt that AI is
going to revolutionise our lives
in remarkable and brilliant ways.
Health care and all these things.
But we're already seeing how AI
is being used by those individuals
that are determined to push hate,
determined to undermine democracy.
ANNOUNCER 1: As
cameras captured, in real time,
the arraignment of Donald Trump,
deep fake photos like these swirled
around social media, seemingly
showing the former president
struggling with authorities.
The real danger with AI is not that
we believe things that aren't true,
is that we just stop
believing anything.
2024 is the year that will have
the most people going to the polls
of any year in human history.
(APPLAUSE)
When we talk about free and
fair elections, we have to consider
how free and fair elections
can be when millions of people
around the world are being
manipulated by social media.
When we see a real
politician giving a statement,
it can be written off as AI.
When we see a hateful figure
that is arrested for a crime,
they turn around and say,
"I didn't do that, that was AI."
Unfortunately, there's a chance
that the worst is not behind us on this.
INTERVIEWER:
Thanks so much, Joe.
I'll have to get protection after
this comes out.(LAUGHTER)
INTERVIEWER: Really grateful.
Here, it will take
me two seconds.
He's just- He's just going
to get noisier at this point.
(CAT MEOWS)
What- What is the
take away, like..?
Because I'm feeling quite
despairing and- (LAUGHS)
You know, it's just
like, are we doomed?
(LAUGHTER) Yeah.
It's a problem you're describing
that I'm very familiar with.
I know you are.
I mean, I don't know
if this is useful for you,
but there's much more
awareness and understanding
that social media is harmful
and the ways that it's harmful
in the way that there really
wasn't even just 3 or 4 years ago.
There is a growing sense that
maybe these are not good places
to get your sense of identity.
People starting to, like, question
their relationship to these apps.
Maybe we're at the start of
a, like, broader awakening
about the harms
of these platforms.
At this point, we know that
Silicon Valley is not going to fix it.
And governments are
going to try with regulations,
but they can only
get so far, you know,
what do you want
to do differently?
What do you want to
change about how you engage
with the internet and
with social platforms,
now that you know
what it's doing to you?
(COMPUTER BEEPING)
(PHONE CHIMES)
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Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet (2024)
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