Andrew Tate Shocked Face

Submission 40,011

Part of a series on Andrew Tate. [View Related Entries]

About

Andrew Tate Shocked Face, also known as Andrew Tate Soyjak or Surprised Andrew Tate, is an exploitable photo of Andrew Tate looking wide-eyed and shocked at a person off camera. The odd screenshot of him made Tate appear ugly in the eyes of many and similar to a Soyjak, resulting in memes and Wojak adjacent redraws in early 2023 on Twitter and elsewhere. Inherently, the meme that made fun of Tate's appearance directly followed his degrading public opinion snowballed by his human trafficking arrest in late 2022. The screenshot was first used by Business Insider in mid-2022 and was taken from a February 2021 YouTube video posted by Tate.

Origin

On February 19th, 2021, Andrew Tate posted a video to his YouTube^[1] channel, TateSpeech, titled, "MILLIONAIRE TELLS YOU WHY YOU'LL NEVER BE RICH." The roughly 11-minute-long video has since been deleted, however, on June 14th, 2022, the YouTube^[2] channel Dennis reuploaded the video. At the 2:33-minute mark (shown below), Tate went into a segment in which he made fun of people who took precautions about COVID-19 and impersonated their speech and facial expressions. From this moment is when the "Andrew Tate Shocked Face" screenshot was taken.

On August 18th, 2022, Business Insider^[3] published an article titled, "'One-stop hate shop': Andrew Tate's rise to TikTok superstardom is fueling violent misogyny and men's rights extremism." The article was the first to include the "Andrew Tate Shocked Face" screenshot that was taken from the YouTube^[1] video before its deletion (shown below, left). On August 21st, 2022, Redditor samiksha66 posted a screenshot to /r/rareinsults ^[4] that showed a Reddit comment making fun of Tate, gaining roughly 34,300 upvotes in five months (shown below, right).

Spread

The screenshot was used by Business Insider multiple times in late 2022, like on December 15th, 2022,^[5] when it was used for the header within a Logan Paul related article.

Despite its early usage, the image didn't become a meme until January 2023, most notably started by the Twitter^[6] account PopCrave on January 10th, 2023, whose tweet that used the image received roughly 100,100 likes in one week. However, six days prior, on January 4th, Facebook^[9] user Eggs Benedict compared the Tate photo to the anchovies from SpongeBob with the caption, "i don’t know how dudes can sit here and call him 'the alpha male' when he’s literally the anchovies blueprint," gaining roughly 5,500 reactions and 42,000 shares in 13 days (shown below).

Within the replies to PopCrave's tweet,^[6] many viral tweets were posted that humorously compared Tate's appearance to other memes, characters and celebrities. For instance, on January 10th, 2023, Twitter^[7] user Ice__Bearrr compared Tate to Meme Man, gaining roughly 53,200 likes in one week (shown below, left). On January 11th, Twitter^[8] user 36angstroms compared Tate to Squidward's face in the When I'm in a Competition and My Opponent Is meme template, gaining roughly 5,100 likes in six days (shown below, right).

Andrew Tate Soyjak

On January 11th, 2023, Twitter^[10] user Bolverk15 tweeted, "bro how is this the dude people consider to be some savior of masculinity – literal wojak," gaining roughly 157,700 likes in six days (shown below, left). In the replies to the tweet, meme creators started posting Wojak renditions of the image. For instance, on January 11th, Twitter^[11] user jorleifur made a Wojak-related drawing, gaining roughly 9,700 likes in six days (shown below, right).

More iterations soon surfaced, like one Wojak uploaded by Twitter^[12] user kishuswaay221 on January 12th, 2023, gaining roughly 6,200 likes in five days (shown below).