content s amassed hundreds of millions of views. his enthusiasm for misogyny, cars and wealth has delivered fame, thousands of fans and many thousands of dollars. he s also being held in romania as part of an investigation into rape and people trafficking. tate denies all the allegations. do you ever wonder why some people who you ve never heard of before, all of a sudden, appear everywhere? and that clip we just heard? well, that was the journalist matt shea, who gained access to tate s compound in romania. to get inside, i had agreed to endure a professional cage fight in romania. i know he s going to lose, but wow, he s actually in there! .along with a hundred tate superfans. matt shea, welcome to the media show. thank you. you ve made this film for vice, it s called the dangerous rise of andrew tate. i wonder when you first decided to try and make contact with him? well, i was actually first brought onto this story by a brilliantjournalist
the better in terms of sharing content of his. so, you know, it s notjust him posting these videos. it s an army of young people and that s very difficult to tiktok and other platforms are finding it very difficult to shut that down. did he acknowledge as much when you spoke to him? i tried to get him to speak on that, and he sort of says, you know, oh, iwouldn t claim to have any control over , his exact words were some random 14 year old singaporean who re edits my clips and tried to sort of say that it wasn t his intention, but really, this is a very well thought out and kind of ingenious campaign to make him famous. now, we ve already alluded to some of the challenges forjournalists and for the media as to whether to engage with someone like andrew tate or not. it s fair to say at times, matt, you had a reasonably immersive experience when in the compound. this is part of your film when you are face to face with members of what s called the war room ,
this, you can t do that. you can ask this, you can t ask that? well, we were always up front with him that we would be making an objective documentary and telling all the facts as we saw them. but, yes, when we were there, you know, there were attempts to control our access. we had chaperones constantly, we were told, don t go in there, that door is locked, if you try and go in there, someone will put a gun in yourface . we had, you know, sort of tall, scary, intimidating, strong men behind us when we were interviewing everyone, monitoring our questions and all of that. so, yeah. well, thank you for coming on to speak about your film. and andrew tate s story more broadly connects directly to how media content is made, distributed, moderated and consumed. and we re going to spend today s edition of the media show understanding that with the help of matt shea, but also with helen lewis, who s staff writer at the atlantic, also presenter of the recent bbc podcast series the new gurus, wh
covering people like this. as matt said earlier, for them, no publicity. you know, there is all publicity is good publicity because itjust puts them in front of people. and the other part of this is the kind of post cancellation sphere of social networks that we now have. so if you get driven off youtube, then you go to rumble, which is a, you know, has even fewer safeguards. hustlers university takes place on discord, which is chat servers that are closed to outsiders. you know, you can t surf past them accidentally. the tiktok algorithm itself is incredibly opaque. we don t know what it prioritises, who s in charge of it, what the rules of it are. so that is the other part of this is that it s actually functionally what happens is people get driven to places where you and i can t see them any more. you know, my tiktok algorithm delivers me videos of sharks and horses having their hooves cleaned. if i d logged into that and signed up as a 14 year old boy and watched a few of these vid
he fits very firmly into what s known as the kind of manosphere . so these are a suite of gurus who attempt to tell young men how to live. and, you know, there is a very strong ideology behind them, which is that a form of masculinity has been lost. and, you know, having watched matt s excellent documentary, the thing that strikes me is it s very much like a 13 year old boy s idea of what it means to be a man. a guy goes up and introduces and says. my name s alpha wolf . and how matt did not laugh at that point. but it s like so much stuff on the internet now where it is both ironic and not ironic, in the sense that they re saying, i m a misogynist, you know, or of course everyone calls me a misogynist, you know? and there s understood to be a performance there, but it is also serious at the same time. and that s something i think journalism really struggles to grapple with, is saying that someone is putting on a show for you, but underneath the show there is something nasty going