Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet

I expected a bashing and ridiculing of Andrew Tate and his followers and it is partly about how terrible Andrew Tate's ideas are, but fortunately we get to see and hear fans of Tate as well so as not to make this movie a totally one sided story. Although it is probably best suited for the Tate haters out there and not so much suited for the fans of Tate. Just saying...

This movie covers 2 subjects: one being masculinity, the other being the power of tech companies.

What interested me the most were the interviews which laid bare the power of social media companies (Instagram for example) and how their engineers can literally flip a switch and affect what 400 million people worldwide get to see (or NOT get to see).

One particular Instagram software engineer (who made Instagram big at the start), said he only worked in a team of a mere 15 engineers, while Instagram was being used by hundreds of millions of people at that time. He talked about his power of being able to influence the news of hundreds of millions of people every day and told about how predictable people were in their behaviour and how easily they could be influenced and hooked by showing specific content.

Will people in the world get to see Andrew Tate that very day yes or no? It's decision was made by computer programmers. 15 of them actually in the case of Instagram. And they wrote software that promoted the vision of Tate with explosive results.

WHY did they promote Andrew Tate's vision and persona? Because it kept people hooked to wanna see more on their tech platform, so the advertisers will wanna advertise on their social media platform more and the tech companies will make MORE MONEY because of it!

Controversy (whichever controversy) is good for advertising power! And therefore good for tech companies profits! And Andrew Tate rose to great popularity because of that particular GREED of tech companies some years back UNTIL it suddenly was stopped. With a flip of a switch!

The other part of this documentary is about why young men were (and still are) attracted to Andrew Tate's ideas and persona. We get so hear several journalists and activists give a social analysis of young men failing to find role models in todays society (often boys from broken marriages without a father). And we get to see a cultural analysis of todays focus on empowering women's rights and their progress, but forgetting about creating and discussing similar norms and values for young men.

Interesting analysis of the power of tech companies and the way we communicate with each other nowaday.