Andrew Tate ‘boosted Substack profile with fake subscribers’

The misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate appears to have orchestrated a campaign to boost his profile on the newsletter-hosting platform Substack by creating fake subscribers.

Tate, who started promoting his newsletter earlier this year, is featured as one of the site’s faster-growing creators. Along with his younger brother, Tristan, he is facing criminal and civil charges that include rape, human trafficking and money laundering in the UK, Romania and the US. They have been banned from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube since 2022 for violating policies around hate speech and harmful content.

Substack enables writers to earn subscription fees directly from their newsletter audiences and says it shares a leaderboard of its fastest-growing publications based on paid subscription growth to help “newer and emerging creators get discovered”.

But data shared with The Observer by the Justice for Prosperity Foundation, an Amsterdam-based nonprofit organisation, suggests that Tate has artificially inflated his profile’s popularity on the site.

Analysis of a random sample of 1,000 subscribers shows 75% of paying accounts had no biography, publications or visible activity anywhere on Substack. Half of those paid subscriber accounts were created within a 16-day window at the start of April.

Tate’s total follower count, which includes unpaid subscribers, dropped from 1.1 million on 14 April to 980,000 on 24 April. “Our working conclusion is that Tate imported a pre-existing email list, most likely harvested from one of his own platforms without the consent of the people on it,” said Jelle Postma, founder and chief executive of Justice for Prosperity.

Substack has previously been accused of promoting newsletters containing extremist views. In 2023, its co-founder Hamish McKenzie addressed its decision to host Nazi content in a post on the site, writing: “We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse”.

A spokesperson for Substack said: “We take the quality of imported email lists seriously. Substack has a standards and enforcement team that monitors all email imports thoroughly to ensure they are legitimate, and, where necessary, takes action”.

The Tate brothers were approached for comment.

Photograph by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images