TV review: Two very good shows in Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet
Andrew Tate is currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in the UK. Picture: Andreea Alexandru/AP Photo
It’s a bit long at 90 minutes, but there are two very good shows in (Sky Documentaries and NOW TV.)
The Doom Scroll bit — how the initial promise of the internet in early 2000s has left us with a death grip on our smartphones, leading to the rise of Donald Trump and a world of hate — you might have heard some of that before, but it’s brilliantly presented here.
I didn’t know that Microsoft built an AI chatbot for Twitter in 2016, which started out with the voice of a teenage girl saying nice things about humanity and ended up proclaiming that Hitler was right about the Jews. I was also struck by a previous Director of Engineering at Instagram who reckoned the algorithm change they implemented in 2016, where users were fed posts they thought we’d like, was a massive untested experiment on 400 million people, with unknowable effects on our brains and human societies.
That’s the worthy bit of this show. The other half is about Andrew Tate, who is what can happen when you carry out a massive experiment. Tate was a slightly famous kick-boxer, kicked off in 2016 following allegations of assault on a woman. Tate was no Nasty Nick, the pantomime villain in the first series of the show. He doubled down on his notoriety with a series of videos on social media, telling his young male audience how to ‘discipline your female’ and tweeting that ‘women should bare some responsibility for being raped.’ You won’t be surprised to hear that he turned this into a money-making racket, charging £337 for a DVD ‘PhD Program’ for his self-styled Hustler University.
This isn’t just talk on his part. Tate is currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in the UK, along with four civil cases brought by women for rape, sexual assault and physical abuse. He denies the charges.
There is nothing special about Tate. He’s just the cocky, spiteful misogynist down the back of the class, trying his best to get expelled. The problem is he has an army of young male followers around the world who would like to bring human society back into the caves, because they are gobbling up his shtick on social media, particularly TikTok.
The big question is tackled at the end — are the social media companies just reflecting human nature, or are they altering it by over-loading people with views which amplify our worst tendencies? The makers of the show reckon the social media companies have to be brought to heel. If it isn’t too late.
