Andrew Tate says women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property.

He also thinks rape victims must “bear responsibility” for their attacks and dates women aged 18–19 beca
use he can “make an imprint” on them, according to videos posted online.

In other clips, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars, guns and portrays himself as a c
igar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping the
m from going out.

“It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,” he says in one vide
o, acting out how he’d attack a woman if she accused him of cheating. In another, he describes throwing
a woman’s things out of the window. In a third, he calls an ex-girlfriend who accused him of hitting her – a
n allegation he denies – a “dumb hoe”.

Tate’s views have been described as extreme misogyny by domestic abuse charities, capable of radicalisi
ng men and boys to commit harm offline.

But the 35-year-old is not a fringe personality lurking in an obscure corner of the dark web. Instead, he is
one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched 11.6 billion times.

Styled as a self-help guru, offering his mostly male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “esca
ping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about
people in the world. In July, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim
Kardashian.

His rapid surge to fame was not by chance. Evidence obtained by the Observer shows that followers of T
ate are being told to flood social media with videos of him, choosing the most controversial clips in order t
o achieve maximum views and engagement.

The coordinated effort, involving thousands of members of Tate’s private online academy Hustler’s Univer
sity 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. In less than three months, the strategy has ear
ned 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.

Yet despite much of the content appearing to break TikTok’s rules, which explicitly ban misogyny and cop
ycat accounts, the platform appears to have done little to limit Tate’s spread or ban the accounts responsi
ble. Instead, it has propelled him into the mainstream – allowing clips of him to proliferate, and actively pr
omoting them to young users.