Your duty of care is just as important as you want it to be
Tate is an influencer, as such he has influenced millions of young men (probably some women too) all over the world, by spread masculinist ideology, "gymbroism" and misogyny
He has multiple cases of crimes and felonies against him:
If you have daughters, nieces, or sisters, you might also want to pay attention. Because that's what other people's nephews, sons, and brothers are listening to, and he's telling them to target young women.
You're focusing on the barest sliver of the pie. They and their ideas are entering politics, the clergy, influencing regulation and policy at national and international levels. Success anywhere is an initiation to a network of brotherhood. Accumulating clout, demonstrating acumen, amassing wealth, and coordinating at scale are not traits of people who will just "disappear" if one person does not give them attention.
And whether you care about them or not, they have access to your kids, your neighbors, your friends, your family, anywhere that social media promotes them, and you can't turn them off.
Our relative isolation was our best defense against destabilizing ideas, but we can't see inside the algorithms, and these people aren't teaching alternative value systems or ethics and civic behavior. They're role models for exploitation, preying on algorithmically selected vulnerable demographics.
And not seeing them doesn't mean you're successfully attenuating their reach, it just means that you're being excluded because you're not their mark. They know who they're looking for, and they know how to recruit. That's what we're up against.
You've described all social phenomena. Just because something is socially constructed (i.e., exists only through other's belief in it, e.g., Tinkerbell logic), doesn't mean that the widespread belief in that thing isn't powerful in that it can effect concrete conditions.
Money is socially constructed, in that if everyone decided money was worthless tomorrow then it would be. But today, I still need money to eat, or have housing. The Law and The State are socially constructed, in that if they were not generally accepted by the masses they could not perpetuate, yet if I break the law today I quite likely will be violently thrown in prison.
There is a difference between acknowledging that something exists and granting it power over you. I would be doing myself a disservice if I actively ignored the existence of religion, for example, because even if I reject the notion that God exists, plenty of other people I interact with will not. And their belief in that fixed idea will affect their perception of the world, myself, and my actions.
Unfortunately a very large part of the population is living their digital life inside closed platforms nowadays and this is getting even worse with younger generations who literally think tiktok and instagram is _the_ internet.
On these platforms influencers like Tate can gain popularity extremely quickly if they resonate with your interests, fears, ideology.
Tate is/was really popular with men of all ages, representing a mix of hustle mindset, ambition, materialistic goals, working out, mixed in with ponzi scheme like courses on how to make it in today’s world.
It gives a simplistic answer to a lot of people, similar to the cults of yesterday.
Halfway across the world doesn't have the same meaning in the age of the Internet. In the mean time, their influence has real disruptive consequences in our ordinary lives. See the classroom[1] as an example.
He’s just some idiot who started a self help/motivational educational website called Hustler’s University which had a “PhD program” that controversially explained how to pimp and make money off of girls by having them perform adult content and making tons of $’s while the man collected the revenue. Then proceeded to get accused by different women of rape and human trafficking and has had a long running legal battles and police investigations about it in different countries around the globe.
Consider yourself lucky. He's a beyond-sleazy, probably criminal online influencer, important in what's called the "manosphere". He's made a lot of money exploiting and abusing women and encouraging other people to do so. If the online clips of him bragging about how to manipulate women into doing pornography don't make you want to throw up, you're pretty far gone. Unfortunately, lots of folks are, in fact, pretty far gone.
>A divisive influencer... third-most googled person in 2023... "king of toxic masculinity"... facing legal investigations in Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States
OP was presumably not asking literally because they thought this was the best way to find out, they were doing so rhetorically to point out that Andrew Tate is not a person of any real significance or mainstream notoriety, who has garnered a weird amount of attention from a tiny set of terminally online people.
Basically, talking about him should be beneath the New Yorker, and the choice to publish about him drags a weird little pocket of the deep internet into the mainstream, in a way that makes us all worse off.
This would be like someone 40 years ago asking who Donald Trump is. It may not effect you yet but it likely will someday. Ignoring these people does not seem to help them go away
