If you’re fortunate enough to have not heard of Andrew Tate, this week’s whirlwind of news might seem to have come out of nowhere. Tate is a kickboxer and self-described misogynist turned online celebrity. He’s not exactly a household name, but his fame within the “manosphere” and his ability to parlay that influence into an assortment of pyramid schemes and webcam modeling scams (or “total scam,” as he puts it) has made him very rich. Or maybe it’s all the organized crime and alleged human trafficking. Nobody’s quite sure, but the Romanian police are eager to find out, and they arrested him on December 29 along with his brother and two other suspects. Per a judge’s order, he remains in custody. This wouldn’t necessarily be headline news on its own, except that his arrest came after he picked a bizarre Twitter fight with environmental activist Greta Thunberg. While this certainly isn’t the first case of social media, celebrity culture, and crime intersecting and going viral, it may be one of the most entertaining, and it has a happier ending than most (that is, if any story that involves human trafficking can be considered happy). Here’s a closer look at two tragic cases in the history of crowdsourced investigations, and the more uplifting, if surreal, story of Tate’s Twitter brawl and subsequent arrest. We Did It, Reddit It’s been almost ten years since the Boston Marathon bombing, and its tragic echoes still linger today. The three people who died, a Medford restaurant manager, a Chinese graduate student, and an 8-year-old boy, form a snapshot of the human spectrum the bombers had lashed out against, and hundreds more were injured by the homemade explosives. Just last year the Supreme Court issued its ruling on the appeal of the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and reinstated a death penalty that’d been previously reversed. The police investigation was criticized for being muddled and aggressive, with confusion among the different precincts and volunteers. One thing that worsened the confusion was a crowdsource investigation that started on the subreddit /rFindBostonBombers and quickly turned its focus upon an innocent person, a mistake that hampered the manhunt. At the time, the idea of such online investigations was fairly new and not entirely unwelcome. If two heads are better than one, then why not a thousand or several thousand? If witnesses can come forward on social media to offer their accounts and corroborate each other’s stories, wouldn’t that help crack the case? Social psychologists could have warned the optimists about the perils of groupthink and confirmation bias, and some of them did. And Find Boston Bombers was about to offer everyone an object lesson. Sunil Tripathi was a Brown University student who’d left school a month before the bombings due to depression. He disappeared shortly afterward and his family turned to social media in their search for any information on his whereabouts. Those pleas came to the attention of /rFindBostonBombers, now numbering over three thousand, as they tried to identify the suspect photographs released by the FBI. Noticing a vague resemblance between Sunil and the bombers, the group focused its attention on him. People claiming to be his acquaintances confirmed his identity and that he seemed moody: case closed. It’s difficult to say which started first, the barrage of spurious tips to the FBI based on those discussions or the harassment and death threats against Sunil’s family. The presumption of Sunil’s guilt spread from Reddit to Twitter and then from Buzzfeed to major news outlets until the FBI issued another statement in an effort to debunk the rumors. One bleak irony of the situation is that the photographs themselves had only been released to try and quell earlier rumors about various innocent people being suspects. Another point of irony is that, while it clearly did nothing to help with that situation, it did alert the Tsarnaev brothers that they'd been photographed and sent them on the run. What could have been an uneventful arrest ended with the brothers killing a police officer and briefly taking a hostage, then a chaotic shootout in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, and then another shootout before his younger brother Dzhokhar was finally arrested. As for Sunil Tripathi, his body was found floating in the Seekonk River four days later. He had nothing to do with the bombing: he’d already died by suicide before it happened. If there’s any silver lining to this tragedy of errors, it’s that the event left its mark on Reddit culture and online discourse. To this day, “we did it, Reddit” remains an ironic meme and a warning about the dangers of turning an online investigation into a witch hunt. Some Weird Love Triangle History doesn’t repeat itself, goes the saying, but it rhymes. If the Boston Marathon bombing, with its police shootouts and car chases, seemed like an action-thriller plot come to life, then the University of Idaho murders might have been a horror movie. Late last year four students in Moscow, Idaho were stabbed to death in an off-campus home. The killer targeted the second and third floors of the three-story house, leaving the two roommates on the first floor asleep and unharmed. The bodies were found the next morning. The murders took place on the night of November 12, and an arrest wasn’t made until December 30. But in the meantime, the internet was on the case. Speculation ran wild online, as it does. The sole male victim, the visiting boyfriend of a resident who was also killed, was first assumed by many true-crime enthusiasts to have been responsible, that perhaps he flew into a jealous rage before being mortally wounded. The house was claimed to have a reputation as a “party house,” which ballooned into a drug binge turned violent. Stacy Chapin, mother of victim Ethan Chapin, voiced her frustration during a local news interview. “The things that are being said are one-hundred-percent not true. There [are] not drugs involved, there is not some weird love triangle. He had stayed the night at his girlfriend’s house, who was one of five girls who lived in the home.” The two survivors were blamed for hiding the truth and were harassed by online sleuths with no involvement except that they’d read the rumors and felt certain they’d figured it out. So was a neighbor with no connection at all save that, according to his accusers, he looked “strange” and therefor was probably involved. Moscow’s police department released a statement on December 2 decrying the rumors and warning that “people harassing or threatening those potentially involved with the case could face criminal charges.” While some of this might sound familiar, one difference ten years has made is that now we’re living in the age of TikTok. Internet celebrities can throw their weight into the ring with a quick phone video and make the stakes much more dramatic and personal, and far-reaching, than any mere subreddit consensus. One such online personality is Ashley Guillard of “Ashley Solves Mysteries," tarot reader and amateur sleuth. She concocted an elaborate conspiracy that had one of the school’s professors sleeping with one of the victims and subsequently arranging the murders with the help of the victim’s ex-boyfriend. None of it had any basis in reality, but the TikTok videos she posted drew millions of views. This sort of thing isn’t precisely new. Self-professed psychics have been offering their advice, sometimes solicited and sometimes not, to police for many decades, and armchair detectives have been watching the news and spinning their own theories for just as long. What’s changed in the online era is the reach and influence of those bystanders and how easily they can connect with each other and with the people they’re accusing. On December 30, Bryan Christopher Kohberger, a criminology student at Washington State University, was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. His vehicle had been placed at the crime scene, as was his DNA upon further testing. He had no connection to the victims, and his online history included open questions for convicted murderers to describe for him what it’s like to kill. Maybe those posts were part of some legitimate coursework, but perhaps they offer a chilling glimpse into his motives. Then again, maybe it’d be best to avoid further speculation. As for Ashley Guillard, she’s facing a lawsuit from Prof. Rebecca Scofield. The police released a statement last week affirming they have no reason to think Scofield was involved. When You Don’t Recycle These two cases, among others, offer examples of crowdsourced investigations gone awry, but occasionally social media justice can lead to a happy ending. While the circumstances of Andrew Tate’s arrest last week turned out to be less dramatic than they seemed at first glance, there’s still a tale of machismo, karma, and poetic justice to be relished. Tate’s webcam business model involved something authorities and support groups call the loverboy method. It involves the trafficker seducing his target, luring her into a relationship, and then using that emotional leverage to manipulate her into sex work, and into a life that she can’t escape. “Come on baby, it’s just this one time.” “You say you love me, so prove it.” “Just take this, it’ll help you relax.” This isn’t really a new trick — pimps have been using such tactics for ages — but it goes against the popular perception of unsuspecting victims being grabbed, Taken-style, from their homes (that sort of trafficking is vanishingly rare). Police have been investigating Tate since early last year, in part because he doesn’t make much of a secret about his methods: on the contrary, he brags about them in his online videos. His mansion and a webcam studio were raided in April 2022, and then again on December 29: this time he was arrested and accused of organized crime and human trafficking. But it’s what happened in the days leading up to his arrest that gives the story such a strange twist. It all started with a tweet about Greta Thunberg. Tate and Thunberg don’t have any sort of connection, and it’s hard to imagine two more diametrically opposite kinds of people. One’s a gleefully misogynistic thirty-something manosphere promoter while the other is a world-renowned teenage environmental activist. Although Tate had previously been banned from Twitter for hate speech, Elon Musk’s recent lifting of most of those bans had allowed him back onto the platform. And, for some reason or another, Greta Thunberg was apparently one of the first people on Tate’s mind… Source: Twitter Most people might respond with a confused “okay.” But Greta came through and gave him the reply he was looking for, though probably not the one he wanted… Source: Twitter There were a lot of celebratory retweets and news articles calling this an epic clapback, although that might be overstating it. But it’s better than his tweet, and she wasn’t the one who started it. Those kudos seemed to get under Tate’s skin because he wasn’t done… Source: Twitter A two-minute video starring a cigar-chomping Tate in a red silk bathrobe? It may be fair to wonder at this point if he’s harboring some kind of secret crush on Thunberg (it’s also easy, given their respective maturity levels, to lose sight of the fact that he’s old enough to be her dad). Where this strange fixation was heading will have to remain a mystery, though, because the very next day the police arrived and took him into custody. Halfway through the video, Tate's brings in two boxes of Jerry’s Pizza (“make sure they’re not recycled,” he announces), which sparked a rumor that the crowdsource investigators had scored a win. The idea was that the writing on the boxes revealed he was in Romania, which tipped off both sharp-eyed viewers and the local authorities to his presence in the country so they could make the arrest. It’s a fun story, but police officials have denied the connection, and it doesn’t make much sense in retrospect: he wasn’t hiding and they’d already been to his home, so the pizza tweet didn’t reveal anything new to them. So what was the real story behind the improbable timing of his unforced feud with Thunberg and his arrest? Could it have just been an unlucky coincidence? Was he tipped off about the upcoming arrest and picked a fight with what he assumed would be an easy target just to vent? Or was it a calculated move to try and rally his fans ahead of his legal troubles? Given that his tweets since then have blamed his arrest on political enemies, was he baiting her so he could turn around and point to the timing as evidence of a conspiracy? If previous cases have taught us anything, it’s to avoid speculation. Since Tate‘s unavailable for comment, however, the last word on this strange saga goes to Greta Thunberg… Source: Twitter Looking for a confidential content writer, ghostwriter, or copy editor for your writing needs? Email me at Jefferey.D.Moore@gmail.com or click here to visit the Services page for more information!
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AuthorContent writer, ghostwriter, editor. Production assistant and writer for Audio Branding: The Hidden Gem of Marketing. Professional geek. Archives
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