It is easy to dismiss young men that idolize Andrew Tate, a man accused of sexual assault, human trafficking, and rape. However, upon closer look, I believe that their admiration reflects challenges unique to the post-pandemic tech era, underscoring the need to guide young men in navigating personal growth and understanding healthy relationships within this new digital landscape.
Of the thousands of fans drawn to Tate’s online platform, the majority are young, heterosexual men of an ethnic minority, particularly aged 18-29. Many enter Tate’s world with well-meaning desires. With a determination to change their station in life, these impressionable minds channel their time, energy, and resources into an archetype of masculinity that has failed to evolve with modern perceptions of gender roles in the 21st century.
Many of Tate’s young male following seek genuine advice on careers, health, and relationships. This young audience often searches for guidance during a vulnerable stage of life, when they feel powerless and have yet to establish their core values. Tate’s assertive, binary viewpoints offer reassurance to those feeling lost at this critical juncture. Unlike past generations who turned to local mentors—pastors, teachers, or coaches—today’s youth can instantly and anonymously consult the internet, a largely unregulated space shaped by leaders who never grew up with it.
In contrast, women have navigated the digital age with more flexibility, reshaping their narrative to embrace emotional strength, balance, and complexity. Popular online narratives led by women, like “Brat Summer” and “Barbie”, celebrate womanhood and validate shared experiences while offering a respite from the struggles of day-to-day life – all without denigrating vulnerable populations.
I believe young men yearn for a similar emotional liberation. Recent research reveals that, contrary to outdated notions of hormonal hysteria, men and women share the same internal emotional range. However, young men are often forced to channel their highs and lows into rigid molds, shaped by a society that historically values strength, stoicism, and calculated detachment.
To understand Andrew Tate’s rise in popularity among young men, we must examine how technology and social isolation have transformed our global economy and social life. With the rise of technology, society began to shift online. With this shift, we have lost vital third spaces that nurture empathy and build positive relationships—social environments outside of home and work, like coffee shops, parks, libraries, churches, gyms, and recreation centers. These places encourage informal interactions, bridge social divides, provide breaks from routine, and support emotional release, affirming personal identity and fostering empathy across cultures. Without them, our society is easily left vulnerable to disjuncture, isolation, and compartmentalization.
This shift was exacerbated and accelerated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The third spaces that remained after the tech revolution were closed, fostering social isolation, and enabling extremist views like Tate’s to spread unchecked within male-dominated online echo chambers.
Tate’s online success represents a response to this widespread social isolation and the weaponization of online algorithms. The social media platforms that host his content prioritize engagement by promoting material that is inherently controversial. Andrew Tate capitalizes on this dynamic, using each controversy to strengthen his persona and expand his fanbase. Within a three-month period after his arrest on January 2023, he gained over 3 million new followers on the public platform X.
As a 28-year-old man, I empathize with Tate’s following. Born into a post-9/11 society, I experienced a terrorist attack on American soil, the Great Recession, numerous school shootings, a global pandemic, and an attempted insurrection—all before I fully developed my understanding of the world. These transformative events unfolded in my life as I viewed them through the lens of the internet, shaping my perceptions and responses to the chaos around me.
My confidence in navigating the online world marked my first taste of freedom as a young man, helping me develop the skills and self-assurance I carry with me today. However, the hours spent online came at a cost. I encountered the chaotic, unsupervised corners of the internet, exposing me to violence, sexual assault, and a relentless cycle of negativity and partisanship. This secondhand trauma shook my sense of self and led me to question my worth as a man in a society often mired in nihilism and absurdity regarding the future of humankind. In response, I distanced myself from my local community and began to idolize the men I encountered on the websites I visited daily, as they spoke to my everyday experiences. Luckily, the comedians and UFO enthusiasts that dominated my algorithm wreaked less havoc on my growing mind than the icon that is Andrew Tate.
For those less lucky than me, the dangers Tate’s platform and those like it might inspire are alarming. In fact, experts have identified a clear pipeline from misogynist content to larger channels of hate, such as white supremacy, antisemitism, and rising rates of deadly violence. It is not inconceivable that the dissemination of openly misogynist content to a population of impressionable and otherwise vulnerable individuals could have potentially disastrous effects, especially when that content explicitly promotes the commodification of women for purposes of commercial sex.
To combat the dangers that these ideologies pose to our society, we must hold social media and tech companies accountable for their content while prioritizing tech literacy and digital hygiene education.
We should also encourage local community engagement and facilitate in-person discussions with teenagers and young adults, who often bear the consequences of older generations’ decisions. I hope we can foster a conversation that includes young men, who are often overgeneralized as sexually deviant, allowing them to be emotionally vulnerable and develop a healthy narrative around sexual health and intimacy. Carrying the burdens of their fathers’ generation is a heavy load, one that con men like Tate easily exploit.
Providing young men with a platform to be heard can empower them to effect positive change and reduce their reliance on online grifters like Tate, who lack genuine investment in their lives. Only then can we hope to foster a society that values and validates the emotional health of young men, and in turn encourages men to engage in healthy relationships with their own masculinity. In doing so, I hope we can promote a generational shift that promotes respect for women and men alike and rejects the commodification and subjugation of women.
This piece was written by one of the CSE Institute externs, Patrick, as part of a three-part series discussing Andrew and Tristan Tate, the cases pending against them, and their impact on the commercial sex trade.
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.