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eyes on the U.S.

Greta’s Andrew Tate Takedown Shines Light On Toxic American Males

Greta Thunberg dealt a knock-out blow online to self-proclaimed "misogynist" Andrew Tate. However, taming the spread of toxic masculinity online is not as simple.

Screenshot of a meme showing a photoshopped image of Greta Thunberg doing a V sign over Andrew Tate's grave

Meme following the Thunberg v. Tate showdown on Twitter

@thegoldentrio_3 via Twitter
Alex Hurst

-Analysis-

Two rounds, two knockouts in the all-out verbal dustup that saw Greta Thunberg win the year (or at least, the internet ) in the final moments of 2022.

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“Hardly anyone is as skilled as Greta Thunberg when it comes to making supposedly grown men cry with rage,” writes Spain’s El Pais .

This, then, is a tale of Tate’s tears told in four tweets.

Greta v. Tate

First, the American boxer, social media influencer , and self-proclaimed “misogynist” Andrew Tate lashed out at the Swedish climate activist, gratuitously tweeting a picture of himself fueling a sports car. Noting that he had 33 such cars, Tate tauntingly offered to send the teenage Thunberg an account of their combined emissions.

Thunberg responded in a language both Tate and his audience would understand: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.” It’s a response that has since become the fourth most liked tweet in history, and one that Tate could not ignore.

He fired back with an insult and a picture of himself in a bathrobe, smoking a cigar, with a pizza box in front of him. Visible on the box was the Romanian pizza shop that he had ordered from.

Just hours later, Romanian police raided Tate’s property in the country and arrested him on charges of human trafficking . He is still being held , and his precious car collection was seized.

Though police later denied that the photo was central to their operation, Thunberg had enough time in between news of the arrest and their statement to pounce again, posting to her account: “this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes.”

The dark side of the Tate brothers

You might not have been familiar with Andrew Tate before the incident — but an alarming number of teenage boys certainly have heard of him and others who share his ideology.

“Inspirational monologues, defense of capitalism, and misogynist theories: ‘masculinist thought,’ which is based on the idea that there is a crisis affecting traditional social conceptions of masculinity, is spreading on social media and targeting a younger and younger audience via Twitter accounts, Telegram groups, and short videos spread on Instagram and TikTok,” Pauline Ferrari wrote last summer in an extensively reported piece for Le Monde .

Online propaganda is centrally linked to recent right-wing terror incidents in the U.S. and Slovenia.

In the United States and elsewhere, far-right influencers have turned to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, appropriating memes and online lingo , as a way of targeting — mainly male — teenage youth with their ideas, writes Nicolas Baygert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in The Conversation .

As France’s Libération reports, Europol, Europe’s cross-border police agency, sees online propaganda as centrally linked to recent high-profile, right-wing terror incidents in the U.S. and Slovenia.

Romanian publication Puterea dug deeper into the dark underbelly of the “eccentric Tate brothers”, pointing out that their influence is built on “a bonafide industry, whose sole purpose is to promote pornography and pimping … Not only are they interlopers, supported by a real marketing machine, they’re dangerous mobsters, who promote prostitution and pornography.”

Toxic masculinity

Other European sources explored what Tate’s popularity reveals about how toxic masculinity is spread online. Swedish Expressen's Helen Ablatova expressed alarm about how many men see Tate as a role model. “If there's one thing young men need, it's not Andrew Tate and his harsh rhetoric … Yes, Andrew Tate's sudden popularity is terrifying. I'd like to say I'm surprised but unfortunately I'm not. The fact that someone so blatantly, openly and extremely sexist has become so famous just shows how few male role models there are in the world. A grim, grim truth.”

While Aftonbladet questioned whether excessive coverage of Tate was inadvertently helping his views reach more people: “Shall we talk about him? Write these types of articles? Or should we rather not give ‘flat-Earthers’ extra space for their conspiracy theories?”

However, German Der Freitag pointed out that social media was not the only cause of toxic masculinity: “Social media must be understood as a place of anti-feminist radicalization. But the advertising industry, or the film industry, also echo the binary gender logic and thus strengthen power relations. This suggests, especially to young men, that it is okay to strive for competition and control.”

In other news …

📰 UP, FRONT PAGE AND CENTER

As the House proceeds to more votes for Speaker today, Europe’s papers (like the Frankfurter Rundschau here) have taken note of the “chaos” caused by the inability of the House Republican majority to get on with what should be the simplest of tasks: electing a leader.

🏈 A CONTACT SPORT INDEED

Ankle sprains, knee injuries, concussions, fractures, herniated discs … In the wake of Buffalo Bills star player Damar Hamlin suffering a cardiac arrest during a game on Monday, El Universal draws a list of the most frequent injuries in futbol americano — a “contact sport that can be very dangerous,” as the Mexican daily writes.

❄️🗽 CHILLY LIBERTY

The "once-in-a-century" blizzard that struck the U.S. in late December and early January inspired Algerian daily Le Soir d'Algérie 's cartoonist Karim Bouguemra.

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FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

How October 7 Has Sabotaged Israel’s Tech And Spyware Sector

Hamas’ unprecedented attack last month reflected an intelligence failure for Israel, which raises questions about the country’s dominance on the global market for sophisticated espionage technology and other hi-tech offerings. Meanwhile, some of the best young Israeli coders have been called up for military service.

March 17, 2021, Haifa, Israel: The Israel Innovation Authority at stage one of eight in a two year plan to create a national mesh network of drones

Nir Alon/ ZUMA
Elias Kassem

Beyond the horror and loss of human life wrought by Hamas , the collateral damage of the October 7 attack stretches into all corners of Israeli society. The complex, multi-front attack demolished Israel’s sense of security and military superiority in the face of Palestinian armed forces and other groups and countries in the region.

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But alongside the political, military and intelligence failures , the attack has been a blow to Israel’s thriving technology sector — notably its world-leading spyware — that will reverberate through the economy in the months and perhaps years to come.

The way Hamas fighters breached Israel’s defenses (pushing through a fortified border barrier, sneaking through the Mediterranean, or flying over the border) may have seemed rather low-tech. Yet the raid on more than 20 Israeli towns and army bases in southern Israel, and reported death count around 1,200, must make Israel’s spy agencies question its tools and methods.

“Hamas surprised us. It was both a military failure and an intelligence failure,” Yaakov Amidror , a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told The Hindu newspaper. “I can say that everything went wrong.”

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