Abbie Chatfield has revealed she’s been receiving fucked up DMs from fans of Andrew Tate, that gross dude who’s been sharing his disturbing sexist and homophobic views on social media.
While appearing as a co-host on The Project, the influencer shared her experience with toxic men who have been inspired by Tate, calling him “the scariest man on the internet”.
The sex-positive influencer and podcast host said she’s been having “a really hard time” with seeing Tate’s content.
“I kind of exist in the realm of feminism and calling out misogyny, and on my podcast, my radio show, I’ve been asked (about him),” she explained.
“I do feel like I really want to ignore him. I want to suffocate him of any oxygen in media, because the more I engage with his content – even to research, for a radio segment – if I look at his TikToks, or he’s tagged in a TikTok and I look at it for too long, that feeds the algorithm and it feeds out more to my followers and to the followers who are already engaging in that content.
“It is getting a bit too big to ignore now. But I do still fear that if I speak about it to my followers or my listeners, it doesn’t really achieve anything. I’m sure those who are my listeners already feel this way, they agree that yes he’s disgusting, he’s awful.
“I’m not sure me speaking about it in a closed circuit will help anything. All it will do is have those who agree with me engage with his content more.”
A few months ago, few had heard of TikTok’s newest star, Andrew Tate. Now, he’s been labelled the scariest man on the internet, accused of spreading violent misogynistic messaging, with TikTok coming under fire for promoting his content to minors.#TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/M6UaDvVmSl
— The Project (@theprojecttv) August 14, 2022
She went on to reveal that she’s received DMs “from what appear to be early teen boys saying, ‘I hope Andrew Tate destroys you,’ or things along that line.
“I also get comments calling me ‘Abbie Tate’, and comments on TikTok especially. That’s where it’s really, really rife.”
She then slammed TikTok’s double standards in its content moderation.
“I upload a TikTok in a white singlet, with a bra on, and it gets deleted in a minute, wouldn’t even go up. But there’s endless videos of him saying that women are property, and extremely vile, misogynistic things. How can that slip through the cracks but me in a singlet can’t?”
Fellow co-host Rachel Corbett also called out the platform’s failure in removing Tate’s misogynistic content.
“When kids look at Instagram and TikTok, and the idea of 11.6 billion views as a success, that then says, ‘Well those views must be good, because look at how famous he is. So I want to emulate that.’ It’s just really dangerous,” said Corbett.
“I feel like TikTok has a responsibility, particularly if those are in the terms of their platform, to remove misogynistic posts. To not be feeding that out even more and feeding the beast.”
Last week we pointed out Instagram’s double standards in its community guidelines as women routinely have posts taken down yet men like Andrew Tate and Tommy Lee are able to pollute our feed.
Do better, all of you.
