'I spent weeks inside Andrew Tate’s online business course – originally called Hustler’s University, it has since been rebranded to “The Real World”. The course costs £40 a month and poses as a get-rich-quick scheme with courses in e-commerce and cryptocurrency. But beneath the surface is a capitalist cult of over 220,000 young men who worship Tate and are being indoctrinated by the far-right who have infiltrated the online business course.'
Rape jokes, racism, bullying - if you've picked up a controller, or scrolled a mouse, to dabble in some online gaming then you've likely come across plenty.
The gaming industry, like others where people interact online, has been trying to figure out how to get to grips with behaviour like this for years.
Dakota Fink didn’t mean to spread a lie. Honestly, she didn’t.
It was May 2021 and the 23-year-old LA-based model was wearing a face mask. “I was thinking I needed to be more involved with TikTok,” she says. So she decided to record a video as a joke: She’d pull off the flesh-coloured face mask on camera, and subtitle it with a claim that women had to peel layers of their skin off after their period.
The UK boss of Samsung Mobile has said he did not give his daughter a smartphone until she was 11.
"I personally wouldn't have given her one early, but it is a parental decision as to when you should get your child a phone," said James Kitto.
He said whatever age people get phones, it was important to make sure they were safe online.
It comes after Ofsted's chief inspector said she was "surprised" when primary school children have smartphones.
Daria Gusa was 16 and still at school, when she says she received a private message on Instagram from Andrew Tate, a high-profile influencer almost 20 years older than her.
"It just read 'Romanian girl' and he put some flirty emoji," Daria told me. "I was confused because I [only] had 200 followers, and it was a private account."
She is one of two teenagers who have described to the BBC how Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan approached them online, apparently using a standard formula.
But assertions that Tate’s rise is a product of today’s young men and their views are wrong. In fact, Tate repeatedly failed to build a personal brand until TikTok gave him the means to saturate news feeds.
Archives of his website show that his business and his pitch to young men was the same four years ago as it is today. As far back as 2019, his website promised courses that would “have your girlfriend obey every command”.
So if Tate’s ambitions and pitch to young men have stayed the same, what changed? The answer lies in how Tate learned to game TikTok’s algorithm, allowing his content to flood millions of news feeds.
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