As summer break ends and students return to their desks, some teachers have noticed a disturbing trend. “Andrew Tate has made his debut in my class,” wrote one teacher on Reddit. “I hear some nonsense about women cheating more than men and the young man cited ‘Dr. Tate.’” “The rise of Andrew Tate is ruining my freshman boys,” wrote another teacher. “They’re addicted to his content. Just this week I had to have 6 convos with families about their sons saying shit like ‘women are inferior to men’ [and] ‘women belong in the kitchen Ms____.’”
Tate, a British-American social media influencer, is well known for making misogynistic comments in his videos, which have been removed from TikTok but at one point had billions of views. In the videos, Tate referred to women as property, described how he would attack a woman who accused him of cheating, and said he doesn’t believe that depression is real (Tate says his comments were taken out of context).
Following a public outcry, last week he was banned from YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. But experts say that Tate is not acting in a silo; in fact, online misogyny has been on the rise for years, and social media platforms are not built to handle it.
