When Andrew and Tristan Tate (pictured) were arrested in the US following an extradition request from the UK, much of the public discussion focused on the criminal allegations they face. Those allegations are serious; they are denied and will rightly be determined in the courts.
But for those of us working to prevent domestic abuse, the significance of this case extends far beyond two individuals. It forces us to confront a more difficult question: what should the law do when misogyny becomes not merely an opinion but a profitable online business model capable of influencing millions of young people?
As the CEO of Sonas, Ireland’s largest provider of domestic violence services, I see the consequences of violence against women every day. While there is never a single cause of abusive behaviour, we know that abuse does not emerge in a vacuum. It develops within cultures, relationships and belief systems. Increasingly, many of those beliefs are being shaped not in homes or schools, but through algorithms.
For decades, the law has responded primarily after harm has occurred. Assault, coercive control, rape, harassment and stalking are all rightly criminalised. Civil remedies provide further protection through injunctions and family law. Yet our legal framework remains considerably weaker when confronting the ecosystem that normalises attitudes capable of underpinning those offences.
That distinction matters. The law is generally comfortable regulating conduct. It is far less comfortable regulating influence.
This presents an obvious challenge in democratic societies where freedom of expression is a fundamental principle. Not every offensive opinion should be unlawful, and governments should rightly be cautious about becoming arbiters of acceptable speech.
However, freedom of expression has never been absolute. We already recognise legal limits where speech incites violence, constitutes harassment, defames others or promotes terrorism. The digital age raises a legitimate question about whether existing legal frameworks adequately recognise the cumulative harms caused by large-scale online dissemination of misogynistic content.
The issue is not simply that some influencers express deeply objectionable views about women. It is that they have built extraordinarily successful businesses around engagement algorithms that reward outrage, controversy and polarisation. Young users can be exposed repeatedly to messages portraying women as manipulative, inferior or deserving of control. Over time, repeated exposure can normalise ideas that would once have been recognised as extreme. These extreme ideas may seem even more normalised to people experiencing the ‘echo chamber’ effect.
Research consistently demonstrates that attitudes towards gender are shaped during adolescence and early adulthood. When online personalities redefine dominance, emotional suppression and control as markers of masculinity, those messages do not remain confined to social media. They can influence expectations within schools, workplaces and intimate relationships.
From a legal perspective, this presents an uncomfortable reality. Harm occurs gradually, diffusely and collectively. It is difficult to attribute responsibility to any single post, video or influencer, even where the overall environment contributes to discrimination or abuse.
Our legal system is designed to assess individual acts. Digital misogyny often operates through accumulation. That does not mean the law is powerless.
The UK Online Safety Act is one attempt to place greater responsibilities on technology companies to assess and mitigate risks posed by harmful online content. Similar regulatory developments are emerging across Europe through the Digital Services Act. These frameworks recognise an important truth: platforms are not merely passive publishers. Their recommendation systems actively determine what millions of people encounter each day.
Whether these measures ultimately prove sufficient remains to be seen. Enforcement will be challenging, particularly where content falls below criminal thresholds while remaining socially harmful. Regulators must also navigate difficult questions around proportionality, free speech and technological feasibility.
But doing nothing is no longer a credible option. The legal profession also has a broader role beyond advising on regulation.
Solicitors and barristers encounter the consequences of misogyny across family law, criminal practice, employment disputes, education law and civil litigation. Coercive control, technology-facilitated abuse, image-based sexual abuse and online harassment increasingly feature in legal practices. Understanding how online misogynistic narratives influence these behaviours is becoming an essential part of understanding clients’ lived experiences.
There is also scope for continued legal reform. Many jurisdictions are considering whether misogyny should be recognised explicitly within hate crime legislation. Others are reviewing how coercive control laws apply to technology-enabled abuse or whether platform accountability should extend further. These are complex debates without simple answers, but they are debates the legal profession should actively shape rather than merely observe.
Importantly, law alone will never solve this problem. The overwhelming majority of boys and young men do not aspire to abuse women. They want healthy relationships, mutual respect and positive role models. The law can establish boundaries, impose sanctions and create accountability, but it cannot teach empathy. That responsibility belongs equally to families, schools, youth organisations, community leaders and the technology companies that profit from the attention economy.
Effective prevention requires all of these systems to work together. As lawyers, we often think about justice in terms of what happens after harm occurs. Domestic abuse services remind us that prevention deserves equal attention.
Every family that arrives at a refuge represents a point at which multiple systems have already failed. The criminal justice system may still have an important role to play, but by then the damage has already been done.
The challenge for lawmakers is therefore larger than determining whether certain conduct crosses a criminal threshold. We need to question if our legal framework is evolving quickly enough to address a digital environment that can amplify misogyny at unprecedented speed and scale.
The Tate case will be decided by the courts. The wider questions it raises about online misogyny, regulation and the law’s role in preventing violence against women will remain long after that process concludes.
I would encourage a second look at the regulation of harmful content online. It was once believed in traditional advertising agencies that nothing sold better than sex. The social media giants discovered the one thing that does sell better than sex: outrage.
Sensationalised content whipping up outrage is the biggest revenue generator for social media companies. This means harmful content, if sensational, can be rapidly disseminated. It is insufficient for social media companies to simply shadow ban or delete accounts from harmful sources because the content can be clipped and shared across other platforms and other accounts. In fact, despite the Tate brothers being banned from many social media platforms, a client of Sonas, who was a victim of domestic abuse, was horrified to see a pattern of misogyny in her own son. She subsequently discovered he was seeing content of the Tate brothers and other ‘manosphere’ influencers on his Instagram for Teens account, despite the brothers being banned from Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
If social media companies can use AI to detect editing in images shared online, surely it can be used to identify harmful content and assist in the regulation and mitigation of harmful misogynistic content?
Fiona O’Malley is CEO of Sonas, Ireland’s largest provider of domestic violence services
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