A SCHOOLBOY searches YouTube for help to ask his crush out – and gets a sickening video about attracting women.
Instead of innocent advice, the lad is fast-tracked to clips of the world’s most infamous woman-hater, Andrew Tate, spewing bile at how to become a dominant man.
Experts are now warning that due to the dark arts of artificial intelligence, misogynistic videos like this are becoming increasingly common for kids to access while “doomscrolling” — looking for depressive and negative information
But the problem does not only lie with hateful content creators such as 37-year-old Tate, and his brother Tristan, 36, who are facing extradition from Romania to the UK over allegations of human trafficking, while Andrew is also accused of rape.
It is also down to algorithms invented and used by social media platforms that cash in on violent and extremist content despite knowing the dangers to children.
Joe Mulhall, a researcher at advocacy group Hope Not Hate, says: “It’s easy to think of Andrew Tate as a tumour we could just cut out.
“But actually, it’s more that he’s gangrenous inside our society, and social media is what allows that to spread around.
“People like Tate, and those around him, create a swamp that’s pernicious, hateful and nasty — their own big ecosystem of hateful ideas. Viewers, like mosquitoes, fly off with everything he preaches and spread it around.”
It is this disturbing underbelly which is uncovered in a new Sky documentary next week, called Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate And The Dark Side Of The Internet.
The film reveals how warped internet figures such as Tate can exploit that system and be rewarded with fame.
Tate, who grew up in Chicago and then Luton, became an influencer through his kickboxing career, making online videos as his alter ego King Cobra and gained further fame with an appearance on Big Brother in 2016.
Days after he left the show, videos emerged of him beating a woman with a belt.
Instead of being ostracised by the entire social media community, he was hailed a hero by users from the “manosphere”, an online group promoting anti-feminist and misogynistic ideas.
Tate went on to create The War Room, a global online network for men, and pyramid scheme Hustlers University, which taught guys how to become pick-up artists.
By gaining growing popularity on social media platforms, podcasts and talk shows, he was soon reaching the fingertips of the five billion users around the world.
It’s easy to think of Andrew Tate as a tumour we could just cut out
Joe Mulhall, a researcher at advocacy group Hope Not Hate
On TikTok alone, Tate’s content has been viewed more than 13billion times.
In his most-viewed videos, he claims women should “bear responsibility” if they are raped, and men should have “all authority” over female partners, saying: “I can’t think of any dynamic on Earth that is better with a female in charge.”
In another, he tells fans: “Why would you be with a woman who’s not a virgin anyway? She’s used goods.”
Chloe Stanton, a teacher with two teenage sons, says in the Sky documentary: “My boys first mentioned Andrew Tate after they said something a bit odd about girls, a derogatory term.
“I googled him. I really didn’t think anyone would be taking him seriously because it was so cringe. But then in school, I saw a change in the boys’ vocabulary, like ‘patriarchy’ and ‘misogyny’.
“In my 20 years of being an educator I’d never heard teenage boys being at ease with these words.
“One day I was asked, ‘Does your husband let you go to work?’ Another student asked for my ‘body count’ — the number of partners you have had. There was a certain verbally aggressive tone.
“It definitely seemed like a regression, a noticeable change in the way boys talk about girls.
“It was wrong of me to dismiss him as a joke. It’s a real threat and the way he relates to humanity makes him really dangerous.”
But the hunger for cash may stand in the way of stemming the rise of this type of content and its creators.
When you’re on social media, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product
Lawyer Matthew Bergman, of the Social Media Victims Law Centre
Lawyer Matthew Bergman, of the Social Media Victims Law Centre, says: “Media companies know they are unsafe — there are no mistakes, no mystery.
“There is just so much money to be made that they keep doing it.
“When you’re on social media, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product. They are selling your engagement to advertisers, and your user data.
“There is an economic incentive to maximise the usage of every user, not by showing you what you want to see, but by showing you what you can’t look away from. Kids are not only prone to getting addicted, but also to have bad judgment on what they do on social media, then to over-react emotionally, which creates a perfect storm.”
Despite growing fears about an AI takeover, when it comes to social media, we are almost two decades too late.
Experts studying the impact of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok on minds and behaviour believe the social media doomsday has been and gone.
Joe Mulhall says: “Everyone talks about the end of the world and the dangers of AI, the darkness and the end of humanity — well, this is the end of humanity, this is AI, this is machine learning.
“The impact of people like Andrew Tate will not just end the moment he gets rid of his social media. He has inculcated people with views about women that will last some of them decades.”
Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram use artificial intelligence to determine what users see by monitoring everything they consume online.
Max Fisher, author of social media book The Chaos Machine, explains: “The incentive is to get the user to spend time on the platforms, to see more ads.
“The things that drive social media are often these niche communities, some driven by misogyny and conspiracy theories, by hatred and fear of the other.
“It takes people from total obscurity and lifts them up.
“Biologically, our brains are wired to only have feedback from ten to 20 people. But social platforms offer big-scale feedback, that can change how we feel and act.”
While there is concern about social media increasingly influencing politics and world views, children remain most at risk.
And despite these firms facing lawsuits about failures to protect users from harmful content, little appears to have been done to push towards change.
Max Fisher adds: “Social media’s engineers believe they are just reflecting our own psychology back at us. While I think there’s some truth to that . . . their platforms exacerbate our worst tendencies.
“People ask me often, ‘Aren’t you worried that AI technology is going to change our society?’ But it’s already happening. It’s too late.”
