Yet despite much of the content appearing to break TikTok’s rules, which explicitly ban misogyny and copycat accounts, the platform appears to have done little to limit Tate’s spread or ban the accounts responsible. In less than three months, the strategy has earned him a huge following online and potentially made him millions of pounds, with 127,000 members now paying the £39 a month to join Hustler’s University community, many of them men and boys from the UK and US. The coordinated effort, involving thousands of members of Tate’s private online academy Hustler’s University and a network of copycat accounts on TikTok, has been described by experts as a “blatant attempt to manipulate the algorithm” and artificially boost his content. Evidence obtained by the Observer shows that followers of Tate are being told to flood social media with videos of him, choosing the most controversial clips in order to achieve maximum views and engagement. His rapid surge to fame was not by chance. In July, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.
Styled as a self-help guru, offering his mostly male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “escaping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about people in the world. Instead, he is one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched 11.6 billion times. Tate’s views have been described as extreme misogyny by domestic abuse charities, capable of radicalising men and boys to commit harm offline.īut the 35-year-old is not a fringe personality lurking in an obscure corner of the dark web. In a third, he calls an ex-girlfriend who accused him of hitting her – an allegation he denies – a “dumb hoe”. In another, he describes throwing a woman’s things out of the window. Shut up bitch,” he says in one video, acting out how he’d attack a woman if she accused him of cheating. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. In other clips, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars, guns and portrays himself as a cigar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out.
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