The ‘manosphere’ goes beyond Andrew Tate – the likes of Kyle Clifford prove it

On Thursday, before Judge Mr Justice Bennathan excluded the evidence from the trial, ruling it “too prejudicial” and of “limited relevance”, it was claimed that “violent misogyny promoted” by Andrew Tate had in part “fuelled” Kyle Clifford’s murderous rampage last July.

Prosecutor Alison Morgan KC told the court that the 26-year-old ex-soldier had searched for Tate’s podcast less than 24 hours before his attack on ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah and mum Carol in Bushey, Hertfordshire, suggesting a link between the show and Clifford’s subsequent actions.

She said: “It’s misogynistic, trying to control Louise Hunt in the context of a final act of spite. You can see how the mind was working.”

Morgan later noted how the material Clifford was searching showed “how he views women and why sexualised violence is an important part of the attack”, in reference to how the defendant raped Louise before killing her with a crossbow in her family home.

While the judge has dismissed a causal link between the two, there’s no denying that we have seen a drastic rise in misogyny and violence against women in recent years – with the likes of Tate spreading hateful messages online and gaining significant traction.

As well as having more than 10 million followers on X, Tate has made videos suggesting rape victims “bear some responsibility” for being assaulted and has referred to married women as “property” that their husbands own. He has also said that, in a heterosexual relationship, the woman should remain at home and that it is wrong for women to have lots of sexual partners but men are allowed to.

What’s more, the 38-year-old and his brother Tristan Tate are currently facing criminal proceedings in both Romania and the UK on charges such as human trafficking and rape, which both men “unequivocally deny”. Additionally, a criminal investigation has just been launched into the pair in Florida.

We can no longer dismiss this sort of online rhetoric. It is not just losers at laptops with porn addictions. It is not just incel keyboard warriors trolling women online. Their hatred goes beyond the digital world and very much is a gateway to real-life violence.

We’ve seen it before with Jake Davison, one of Britain’s worst mass shooters, who was obsessed with incel ideology and searched for information online about incel serial killers just days before murdering five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl.

He was also known to have expressed extreme misogynistic views and, in the month before the killings, he had filmed himself talking about his “lack of success at dating apps, disillusionment of life and self-hatred”.

Before him there was Elliot Rodger, who, in 2014, shot six students at the University of California Santa Barbara before shooting himself. Two of the women he killed were shot outside a sorority house. In a suicide note, Rodger described sorority members as “the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have”.

It’s not hard to join the dots here.

And yet, this kind of content is easily accessible online to the point it’s becoming normalised and even accepted – YouGov data from 2023 found that around a quarter of young men agree with Tate’s views on how women should be treated.

Tech giants need to do more to intervene and stop this harmful content in its tracks.

Since taking over X, Elon Musk has culled the platform’s fact-checking and community teams that once safeguarded women and others. He has also amplified right-wing, misogynistic voices, which has no doubt emboldened those with these types of ideologies.

Following suit, Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that he, too, would be scrapping Meta’s fact-checking resources, in favour of “community notes” – which, experts have warned, will spawn misinformation and allow harmful content to be accessed more easily.

And that’s before we even get to TikTok, YouTube and the many other social media platforms and forums these people are using to target others. The “manosphere” knows no bounds.

What might’ve happened had Clifford not been able to engage with Tate’s content? Would the three female members of the Hunt family still be alive? Would Clifford have had the impetus to do what he did had he not been able to access misogynistic content online?

Of course, the devastating truth is that we’ll never know.