Twitch star Pokimane spoke out on controversial influencer Andrew Tate, saying she’s “sad” and “scared” of the online figure’s influence in the wake of his social media bans.
Imane ‘Pokimane’ Anys has returned to the internet after a month-long break from streaming on Twitch — and in her absence, a lot has happened.
From July through August, former kickboxer and social media mogul Andrew Tate became a hot topic of conversation, mostly for his inflammatory views on women.
These views resulted in him receiving multiple bans from most social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, among others.
Andrew Tate has been banned from most major social platforms.
Tate published his “final message” to the world via Vimeo before turning his efforts to creating content without the use of social platforms. Pokimane returned to the internet a week later, having missed the drama during her lengthy hiatus.
Pokimane speaks out on Andrew Tate
During an episode of the H3 podcast with Ethan and Hila Klein, Pokimane was asked about her thoughts on Tate… and the streamer admitted his popularity and influencer among young men made her “sad.”
“To me, it just made me really sad, because I thought as internet users, we had kind of moved past this sort of talk, this sort of misogyny, this sort of rhetoric,” she began. “To see it come back and rise up in such a massive manner, I guess was just surprising and kind of sad to see, especially in regards to the harassment that it resulted in.”
“Something I don’t think people discuss enough is — clearly there must be a lot, especially young men, who for some reason resonate with what Andrew Tate is saying. Why is that, and are there any takeaways we can take from that in order to have things not snowball so far out of control in the future?”
“It makes me kind of scared,” she continued. “Being in an industry that’s so adjacent to that, like gaming, streaming… I don’t know.”
This isn’t Poki’s first time speaking on influencers with controversial views of this nature; the streamer was also pulled into discourse with podcasters Fresh and Fit, who blamed her “thought process” for high divorce rates.