The Misogynist World of Tik Tok!
The four-time kickboxing world champion, Andrew Tate is the new star of Tik Tok. An influencer who professes profound misogyny got famous in no time, this was cleverly manipulated by social media algorithms, particularly TikTok. Concerning Tate’s rise to fame and subsequent social media ban, numerous articles have been written. From marginal fame to stardom, Tate got everything.
Andrew Tate thinks that women belong in the home and they are a man’s property. He has also blamed the rape victims and stated “bear responsibility”, as it is a woman’s fault that she got raped. He has faced backlash from various charities and celebrities because of the way he ‘promotes’ domestic abuse, he could actually be influencing young men.
The tailored choice;
Social media tend to isolate users in a filter bubble and provide them with tailored feeds depending on our search history, and shared or saved videos. Being trapped in this bubble means interacting with one point of view, whereas turning a blind eye towards the other side of the coin.
TikTok’s most negative innovation in my view is that, in contrast to the previous systems of algorithms, it does not simply wait for the user to indicate that they like a video by giving it a thumbs up or satisfy itself by judging what the user chooses to view. Instead, it seems to actively test its own predictions by showing videos it thinks might be fun and measuring how people react. Based on how the views are accumulated TikTok tends to serve each individual video to a small batch of people, and if the majority of users in a batch have a high number of positive interactions with the video, and the number of users in these batches increases with each successful round. Thus, it provides every user “a chance to be famous”, even if it is someone like Andrew Tate, published in the guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star.
Finally proving that TikTok algorithms played a major role in this, as in 2022 when his video got more than 12 billion views. In the video he was seen choking a woman, gripping her neck and calling her ex-girlfriend a hoe, because she accused him of cheating. There is a piece of evidence, proving that tate asked his followers to share his most controversial clips, in order to achieve millions of views and Tik Tok engagement. In less than four months he made millions of pounds with over 127,000 followers on the internet.
However, the majority of articles fail to acknowledge that Tate’s ability to utilize platform algorithms was the only thing novel or innovative about his rhetoric. The example provided by Tate exemplifies how proponents of misogyny are utilizing technology to amplify their message. As a user of TicTok myself, I use to hate this personality but still saw his video on my feed every single day. Because, tik tok algorithms are set in a way that if you watch, like, share, or save a video, your feed will revolve around it. There is no going back!. This has created a vicious cycle of misogyny, as Tate’s fame didn’t stop there the videos which had his name tagged in them were viewed more than a billion times.
However, the platform appears to have done little to limit Tate’s spread or ban the accounts responsibly, despite the fact that much of the content appears to violate TikTok’s rules, which explicitly portrays misogyny. Instead, it has pushed him into the mainstream by allowing clips of him to spread throughout the internet and actively promoting them to the young generations.
TikTok is a hypocrite, as the community guidelines for TikTok state that the platform is “inclusive and supportive” and prohibits content that “praises, promotes, glorifies, or supports any hateful ideology,” including misogyny. However, much of it appears to meet the definition of hateful content. In addition, the terms of TikTok explicitly state that they prohibit accounts that “impersonate” other users by utilizing their name or image in a “misleading manner.”
Tate, whose content is still widespread on TikTok, an extreme misogynist remains in the headlines.