In the wake of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s epic Twitter knockout of toxic poster boy Andrew Tate, a lot of questions are ringing across social media. Netizens are searching who is Tate. For the uninitiated, he is a former professional boxer and social media influencer who spreads vile misogynistic views.
Unfortunately, Tate still has a massive fan base, particularly among incels — young men who are members of online communities that discuss and share content that are hostile towards women and children. His videos have garnered millions of views. Facebook, Tiktok and Instagram shut him out but it a tad late. Elon Musk, however, reinstated him on Twitter in November 2022.
Questions such as how to stop the next Tate and how to make netizens, particularly women, safe from trolls have emerged. Musk’s chaotic handling of Twitter has also raised concerns over content moderation. To address such issues, it is essential to look at the recommendations put out by the UK and US based non-profit, Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
In September 2022, CCDH released a report ‘The Incelosphere: Exposing pathways into incel communities and the harms they pose to women and children’. It was a “systematic study of over a million posts over the past eighteen months on the world’s leading incels forum”. It said that platforms like YouTube and Google are enabling pathways to the ‘Incelosphere’.
CCDH urged YouTube to remove incel channels. It also urged Google to “derank incelosphere websites in search results for terms connected with inceldom, body image, suicide, and unemployment”. The same recommendations were extended to Twitter — to close down accounts spreading such views. Various reports indicate that social media hate content leads to real-world consequences, so such content must be nipped in bud.