Andrew Tate now has two fewer platforms to spew his misogyny, as Meta banned the kickboxer-turned-toxic social media influencer from Facebook and Instagram on Friday for violating its policies on dangerous organizations and individuals.
Tate has become something of an idol to countless impressionable young men and boys, over his incredibly disturbing rhetoric that women are essentially the property of men and should not be afforded their own autonomy as human beings. Among his charming beliefs are that he thinks that women who are raped are somehow responsible or deserving of it, and that his followers should “imprint” on 18 and 19-year-old girls before they become too sexually experienced.
Even his initial rise to fame in 2016 involved getting kicked off of Big Brother after video surfaced of him beating a woman with a belt. (He claimed that the act was consensual and chalked the controversy up to an assassination of his character.) Currently, Tate is being investigated for human trafficking in Romania, where he now lives.
“Read the Bible, every single man had multiple wives, not a single woman had multiple husbands,” Tate once said, on the subject of polyamory. “It’s against the will of God — it’s disgusting.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the various deplorable things that have come out of his mouth over the past several years.
According to the BBC, Tate had 4.7 million Instagram followers at the time his account was removed — which is up from just around one million in June. His ousting from the social media platforms comes as teachers are seeing an uptick in problematic behavior from male students, and many have implored parents to pay attention to what their kids are going online.
However, Tate’s YouTube channel, TateSpeech, which boasts over 750,000 subscribers, is still active, as is his presence on TikTok. The BBC has reached out to Google to comment. It would not come as a huge surprise if Tate is soon banned from both of those platforms as well.
