Andrew Tate is a TikTok star with videos viewed over 12 billion times. If you’re irritated by the stupidity of people doing little dances, you should be concerned about the content of this exkickboxer, who preaches that women should be beaten, choked, and blamed for their rapes.
What does a guy like Tate have to do with the 13yearold who killed a teacher and stabbed five other people? A fragment of what abounds on the internet today: communities that radicalize teenagers and young men into murder.
Last year, The Guardian published an investigation showing how algorithms pulled Tate out of the darkness and made him a celebrity, and how users are drawn to more violent content.
Hatred of women has been on everyone’s lips since the “Coach da Campari” episode, but there are other factors that attract young people: identification. Members of these communities share social isolation, fear, low selfesteem, feelings of rejection, social failure, and sometimes a lack of career prospects.
These young people seek within these groups what they believe to be their only chance for salvation: to get revenge on the society they don’t fit into by committing murders that would make them “famous” but which they actually reverse in heroes in the caves, which they frequently visit.
I became interested in the topic in 2018 when ten people were killed in Canada. The investigation revealed that the killer shared his plans, receiving encouragement and applause. His inspiration was a 22yearold who killed six college students in the US, leaving behind a manifesto titled “My Troubled World” and saying the deaths were his revenge on humanity. No wonder the student from São Paulo used the name of one of the perpetrators of the Suzano massacre as an identifier on the networks.