This content appeals to boys who are frustrated and it turns them into angry men. It’s quite worrying.’ Brace, who advises the Home Office, is also concerned. “It is bleeding out into mainstream society,” he says. “This whole idea of male supremacism is growing and on the rise.” It doesn’t matter even if a video is posted to critique or question what these alpha males are saying. They don’t care if you’re laughing at them, it just feeds them and they get bigger.’ It is disturbingly easy to ‘gamify’ the algorithms on some social media platforms to churn out whatever bile you like. For all of Tate’s garbage that he put out, he wasn’t the only person actually posting it. In another video, he says he has been investigated by police for allegedly abusing a woman, which he denied, in a case where he had his house raided, devices confiscated and was held in a cell for two days.

Tate is winning other extremist supporters too. Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, has defended him, which seems bizarre for a man who has described Islam as a “disease”. Just how is Tate managing to bridge such divides? Despite working with children, the safeguarding expert did not hear of Tate until late in 2022 when the influencer already had gained notoriety online - Tate was then arrested in December that year. According to Richard, his primary aim was to help shy, nerdy guys, not unlike himself (he only had his first kiss at 21), to gain the confidence to meet women. Islam, which he calls the "last true religion", “fixes a lot of the problems that men are currently facing,” Tate says in a video on a YouTube channel called “Muslim Convert Stories”. “Islam keeps [women] in a role where [they] obey their men, women have big families, women are exceptionally happy,” he adds. “May Allah Guide him,” notes the video description. Imran accepts that many “patriarchal, Salafi” Muslims lap up Tate’s rhetoric. Last year, Nadeine Asbali, a Muslim mother and teacher, wrote powerfully of her fear that “this content has its hooks into some within my own community. I’ve seen [Tate’s] content shared on social media by Muslim boys, who see this iteration of violent misogyny echoed in some of the warped interpretations of gender dynamics that surrounds them.”

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TikTok’s terms also explicitly say they ban accounts that “impersonate” someone else, by using their name or picture in a “misleading manner”. Conroy sees boys who feel "robbed" of the world they've been taught they should rule, even though that gender imbalance is outdated and impractical. Many of these young boys are about to reach voting age, bringing their unresolved emotional turmoil with them into adult spaces and influencing the sway of politics. Last week, however, content being promoted to users on the platform appeared to be in flagrant breach of the rules. Styled as a self-help guru, offering his mostly male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “escaping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about people in the world. In July, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.

This was a stark contrast to only nine per cent of women in the same age range who viewed him as a positive figure - this diminished even further in 16 to 17 year old girls. Concerningly, for 16 and 17-year-old boys, Andrew Tate was far more recognisable than prominent political figures in Britain. Andrew Tate is not smart or savvy,’ he explains. ‘But he’s figured out that there’s lots of men who have podcasts and if he shows up with sunglasses, smoking a cigar and says the craziest thing you’ve ever heard, that clip will go viral. So if you've been brought up understanding sex through the prism of porn. It desensitises men in terms of women and shows that they are the doer and the done to, subject and object, that has very powerful force on a child whose brain is nowhere near fully developed."Actually, let's go upstream and talk about the values and beliefs of boys and young men - because that includes misogyny." Many Tate videos appear, at first glance, to be harmless, even funny. In his trademark straight-talking style, he derides men who drink tap water instead of sparkling water and people who own cats. “Real men have dogs,” he says. Other material is presented under a banner of male self-improvement. Conroy said: "Engage young men in conversations and develop their understanding of what is a risk or a protective factor for them. They [then] develop the sense of them being a risk or protective factor for others, including women and girls. In extreme cases it has even led to murder – in Plymouth, 22-year-old Jake Davison engaged in incel forums before going on a shooting spree, killing five people, and injuring two others, in August last year. The NSPCC’s Hannah Ruschen, a policy officer, added: “Viewing such material at a young age can shape a child’s experiences and attitudes, resulting in further harm to women and girls in and out of school and online.”

To have the best chance of getting people to sign up, they are advised to stoke controversy to improve their chances of going viral. Critics say his rise raises concerns about online misogyny and potential radicalisation, with one woman online labelling him “the scariest man on the internet”. Another, seeking advice in a forum, described how her boyfriend’s “attitude and opinions” had changed “dramatically” after watching videos of Tate. Let's talk openly and broadly about what keeps young men safe. It would be a political choice to talk about misogyny only. It’s about power, not faith. Christianity, says Tate, is “a losing religion” where tolerance “of everything [means] you stand for nothing”. By contrast, he speaks of his “respect for [Islam’s] “warrior aspect”. But perhaps the critical overlap between Tate’s followers and those of the far-Right is the attraction to so-called “red pill” conspiracy theories, whose followers say (in an allusion to the film The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves’ character takes a red pill and sees that he has been living in a world of illusion) that they have had their eyes opened to “elite” plots to keep them down, whether in politics generally, or gender politics specifically.I think Tate understands the emotional turmoil, frustration, or whatever that might be that is inculcated into some boys," Conroy explained, "It's a kind of therapy, he's saying to them 'your feelings that I know you've got, you can put them down because it's right that we do this' and to a young mind that's very appealing." Conroy, who founded Men At Work which supports young men, explained: "He's got influence. He can tip people's ways of interpreting phenomena in their lives either one way or another and that's really political. That's really powerful." If you don’t know who he is, you don’t know quite a lot about the modern world; he’s huge,” says Richard Reeves, author of “Of Boys and Men”, an acclaimed examination of a modern crisis in masculinity. Tate, Reeves notes, is a master of sowing conflict and division - catnip to the online world where the biggest sin is not provoking a reaction. So what can be done to try and curb the damage that alpha males, and their potential entrées into harmful online communities, are doing? Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women coalition, said many of the Tate videos appeared to “clearly violate” TikTok’s terms and said that “by taking no action”, the platform is “facilitating and ultimately profiting from the potential radicalisation of its young male users”.

The difficulty, says Reeves, is that by no means all Tate’s followers are misogynist. Rather, he notes, “We’ve torn up the old script for what it means to be a man or a woman. Women have got a powerful new script. What did we replace the male script [of economic provision for a family] with? Nothing. The script for girls is ‘do’. The script for boys is ‘don’t’. Don’t mansplain. Don’t make a pass. Being told they are a bit toxic. We create a culture in which they fear all the things they shouldn’t be. Enter Andrew Tate. There are many young men who are desperately asking how to be a man today and he provides an answer.” The responsibility does not lie completely at Tate's door, however, as Conroy points to porn as a major factor in "desensitising" boys. He explained: "I don't know that many people really grasp exactly how ubiquitous it is, and how much of a formative force it is in young minds. Andrew Tate with Nigel Farage, posted on Facebook in March 2019. Photograph: Emory Andrew Tate/Facebook

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It's a classic conspiracy,” says Brace. “In a complex situation it offers a nice clear narrative. It’s not your problem, it's everyone else.” The safeguarding expert added: "Politics is also often a way of shoring up your own position and making material gain and in that sense, Tate has got rich through taxing the fear of boys. Tate’s views have been described as extreme misogyny by domestic abuse charities, capable of radicalising men and boys to commit harm offline.