This thesis investigates the broader themes of Andrew Tate’s Emergency Meeting videos to examine the digital content Tate creates and its relation to masculine culture. Drawing on the video transcription texts, a mixed-methods framework is employed, utilizing BERTopic modeling and thematic analysis. Through topic modeling the breadth of topics is revealed, displaying five main themes. Then the initial topics are qualitatively refined through an in-depth thematic analysis, revealing four overarching themes: The Truth About Society, Getting Rich, Constructing Masculinity, and Content Promotion, each with multiple sub-themes. These themes are examined in relation to Connell’s (1987) theory of hegemonic masculinity, uncovering how Tate reinforces and constructs hegemonic masculinity. These findings offer insight into digital role models and their influence in shaping how young people perceive gender and construct their own identities.
About 120 Emergency Meeting Videos were collected from Rumble.com. Each video was about three to four hour long videos. These videos were then transscribed with a video-to-text transcription model called Deepgram. Text was preprocessed with intention for text analysis and topic modeling.
This study adopts a mixed-methods framework combining quantitative topic modeling with qualitative thematic analysis to examine the content of Andrew Tate’s Emergency Meeting videos. This framework is designed to inductively map the broader themes of Tate’s discourse using topic modeling and utilizes thematic analysis as a means for interpretive depth. This process is purely inductive where theory is only applied at the end of the thematic analysis. This approach enables a data-driven comprehensive understanding of the content Tate is producing, allowing themes to emerge shaped by the data. Using these themes, theory is then used for interpretation of themes to examine how hegemonic masculinity is constructed and reinforced in Tate’s Emergency Meeting videos.
Kousis & Tjortjis (2024) proposes a structured framework that integrates topic modeling with Braun and Clarke’s (2006) guide for thematic analysis. Below is a chart to explain the workflow:
BERTopic modeling was chosen as this model is able to idetify patterns and themes across documents, making it perfect for exploring a large corpus.
In these findings, it is demonstrated that Tate’s content is not just entertainment, but a means for the dissemination of Tate’s ideological ideas in relation to masculinity. While this study is limited by its focus solely on the Emergency Meeting videos and the technological constraints of the AI transcription model, it still contributes to the broader conversation about masculinity in digital spaces and the online influence of content creators on youth identity formation. Future research should expand on Tate’s content, incorporating multiple mode analysis, analyzing his other content, or comparing Tate’s narrative to other prominent figures in the manosphere to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the totality of Tate’s content and its presentation of masculinity. This study’s critical engagement with rhetoric and methods offers a more nuanced discourse on Andrew Tate and the formation of masculinity in digital spaces, calling for continued research across media studies, gender theory, and youth sociology.