Andrew Tate’s social media showed how the far-right plan to draw in a new generation

It’s easy to dismiss “incels”. Their insistence on lurking in some godforsaken corner of the internet muttering about the horrors of feminism, left-wing politics and those terrible, uppity women who refuse to be a subservient wife and baby machine isn’t a great way to make friends.

So why did Andrew Tate have millions of followers before he was banned from Facebook, Instagram and from TikTok?

The easy answer is that Tate is not an incel. After all, he’s had a girlfriend and is a successful athlete. Scratch the surface however, and the typically incel traits of a deep-seated contempt for women and far-right sympathy are plain to see. The only real difference appears to be an understanding of algorithms and an inflated ego.

Algorithms appear complicated but the way they work is simple. The more people that share a post, the more popular it appears to be and the more the algorithm recommends it to everyone. Great if you want your little dance to go viral on TikTok, less impressive if you’re posting misogynistic extremist rants with the intent of radicalising young men.

As we’ve already seen from the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial, TikTok and Instagram have a huge misogyny problem. For over a month, funny dances and “comedy sketches” pushed the algorithm into promoting hundreds of people mocking someone claiming to be a domestic violence victim and joking about her alleged rape using far-right hashtags.

Tate’s business, “Hustlers University” (HU), took this one step further. Marketed as a way for Tate wannabes to become just like him, HU was essentially an algorithm-manipulating pyramid scheme. As with other MLMs, his followers paid for the privilege of selling Tate’s product. Himself.

Making money involved them reposting clips of his videos to as many sites as possible using specific hashtags. As they earned a bonus, Tate gained traction. To-date he’s racked up 12.7 billion TikTok views. Since his ban the “University” has ceased doing business, but there are hundreds of other, similar accounts ready to take his place.

“Trad Wives” make up the female side of the equation; women in their late teens and early twenties dedicated to the traditional housewife lifestyle, exemplified through expertly filtered images of their babies and baking skills, have been all over social media for years.

Framing their decisions as just another lifestyle choice, peel back the expertly applied layers of foundation and it becomes clear that, for many, it is less Home & Hearth and more Kinder, Kirche, Küche. Promoting their content with #NotAllMen and #MAGA hashtags, while claiming to hate the blue-haired, pro-choice feminists they were “before they grew up” (in some cases a whole 18 months earlier), they’re the acceptable face of a dream that white nationalists have been trying to sell for decades.

Based on the idea that white people will be a minority by 2066, from a paper written by Prof David Coleman of Tufton Street think-tank Immigration Watch and the Eugenics Society, the traditional lifestyle is seen as the best way to repopulate the Western world with white families and undo the “damage” done by those evil feminists, who are clearly to blame for everything from fragile male egos to immigration.

Ditzy housewives, dressed-up Incels and alt-right edgelords might not look like a serious threat but, as both the US and UK swing further right, their messages are far more aspirational than those of the “Muslamic raygun” mumbling far-right activists of the past. From gleaming smiles and polished pecs, they’re the perfect poster kids for those dedicated to rolling back the rights of women and minorities and convincing us it’s the adult thing to do.

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For those on the far right looking to radicalise a new generation, it has become the central motif of their campaign and social media their preferred stage. After all, whether you’re posting for or against Andrew Tate, you’re sharing his content and millions of young people are seeing it. When you are condemning far-right content, you also share it with people who may not have been exposed to those ideas.

To fix this requires us going against our nature. Our continued presence on social media relies on promoting our views at every opportunity. The algorithms cannot distinguish between good content and bad, just like they can’t tell whether you’re re-posting something in agreement or with the burning hate of a hundred suns. Every time you stitch, share and repost to highlight fascism, you’re raising their profile along with your own.

Of course we cannot simply sit back and ignore such content; as Hope Not Hate pointed out in their report last week, Tate’s far-right connections go deeper than a few edgy comments on TikTok. What we need to do is get smarter at reporting and highlighting far right content without enhancing it. And platforms need to take responsibility for the content they’re promoting - putting user wellbeing over profits.