Angry Young Men for Trump
Liz Mermin
On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: ‘All the influencers back him, and he’s all over social media’ (this although my son has no social media accounts and is not supposed to go on YouTube). ‘Harris is all over social media too,’ I said. ‘Not the same,’ he said. He was right. I should have known better.
I spent most of 2023 uncomfortably immersed in dark, angry corners of the internet for a documentary feature (Doom Scroll) on the infamous misogynist and long-time Trump fan Andrew Tate. Our working assumption was that the design of social media platforms, the way their algorithms are tuned, made the success of someone like Tate inevitable. Tate himself was just the loudest, most dogged or luckiest of the thousands of grifters striving to be the world’s most influential influencer by taking on the ‘woke mob’ with a professed return to ‘traditional values’.
Many people refused to talk with us. They said that by giving Tate more attention we were serving his ends. The idea that a television documentary would have any influence at all on Tate’s enormous popularity is, unfortunately, laughable; the idea that ignoring him will make the problem go away is wishful thinking. What we hoped the film might do was help viewers understand that social media companies churn out addictive, unhealthy products – like junk food or tobacco – with no concern for the effects they have on consumers.
The violence of Tate’s misogyny led to a ban by all the major platforms in August 2022, but his content spread even further: at his prompting, an army of followers clipped and posted his videos so that they continued to dominate the feeds of boys and young men on TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. The platforms made periodic and ineffective attempts to clear him off (except Elon Musk, who welcomed him back to Twitter, where he went from zero to one million followers in 24 hours). They could have done more, but why would they? Tate served their bottom line.
The popularity and success of such a ridiculous and disgusting character prompted some useful self-reflection: in this case, urgently needed discussions about some of the challenges facing boys and young men. But calls for healthier male role models and images of positive masculinity ignored the way that social media algorithms work: positive messages simply can’t compete with negative ones. Tribalism, conflict and extremism provoke responses and are therefore rewarded by the algorithms. Moderation, compromise and nuance suppress engagement and are demoted. Michelle Obama’s mantra ‘when they go low, we go high’ is a losing strategy on social media.
The platforms’ algorithms are content agnostic: their goal is to keep hold of your eyeballs for as long as possible so they can collect your data and sell you ads. If we lived in a world where more of us engaged with Fellini than serial-killer docuseries, the wealth of material freely available online might lead to a new enlightenment. But anger, resentment and fear are what keep us engaged the longest. This is win-win for someone like Tate: those who love him engage because his content is angry with others (feminists, liberals) and those who hate him engage because they want to prove him wrong. Tate taught students at his online ‘university’ the adage that it doesn’t matter if they hate you or love you, so long as they’re talking about you. He figured 60 per cent negative to 40 per cent positive reactions was the sweet-spot.
One of the most striking post-election statistics was the rise in support for Trump among the young. Many of us were shocked, though we shouldn’t have been. Trump’s content was being pumped at young men at a greater rate even than Tate’s. He did the rounds of manosphere podcasts, where he made tasteless jokes that landed well with the people who also laughed at the offensive remarks made about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally at the end of October. There really is no such thing as bad publicity on social media. So why was the election result a surprise?
Comments
If you live in that part of social media, yes. It's easy to find and curate influencers, vloggers, etc, creating carefully made, thoughtful content, many of whom have thousands of followers. Tate's message is inherently antagonistic; there is infinite space for messages that are not.