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(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 Nazi.

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 racist 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 gun 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 fucking 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 gun 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 ass, rape you, strangle you, kill 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,

fucking 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: Fuck Instagram!

A. TATE: Fuck 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 balls.

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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 bullet 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) Fucking 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 war.

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 whore 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 rape 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 assault and then murder her.

I had people shooting videos, wearing a skull mask and holding

a knife up to the camera,

talking about how they were going to murder 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, bitch, 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 shit 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 fucking 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 dick.

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, bitch.

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 fucking shit-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.

Fuck 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 slave 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 gun 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 raped.

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 Shooter 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 cocking 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, fucking 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 War Room.

INTERVIEWER: Why is it called the war 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 War Room.

The driving intent behind the War 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 fucking 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 shit 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 fucking 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 illegal 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 bitch, fuck... 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 fucking gym. Get built.

You're built, you don't need fashion.

..looks like you!

I'll close my eyes. I'll fuck a bitch 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 shit.

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 fuck?

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 bitch."

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 shooting

at a supermarket in Buffalo.

ANNOUNCER 2: The shooter was heavily armed and had tactical gear

and a tactical helmet on.

ANNOUNCER 3: According to the lawsuit, the shooter was radicalised

by algorithms on the social media sites that he used,

which fed him, and I'm quoting here, "increasingly racist,

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,

racist, 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, bitch!"

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 bullet 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 fucker.

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 rape is disgusting. I'd take a stronger stance on rape

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 war.

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 kill 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 rape.

ANNOUNCER 2: Widely regarded as one of the most famous people online.

He's grown his profile through misogynistic,

racist and homophobic 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 rape,

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 kill 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, shit. 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 killed 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 racist, 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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