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Andrew Tate is a social media personality who was recently charged with rape and human trafficking offences.

There are screenshots available of Andrew Tate's website cobratate.com, on which it says:

My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.

Sources of the screenshots (which contain erotic imagery) are this Reddit page and this YouTube video at 37:50. It is also mentioned in a BBC interview at 1:55. The first source seems to be from Laila Mickeltwait on Twitter. However, the website is not available on the Wayback Machine anymore. Has Andrew Tate actually said this, or are the screenshots fake?

Avery
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Riemann
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    Is he or some defender of his claiming it's fake? – Dean MacGregor Jun 23 '23 at 11:49
  • @DeanMacGregor In the link the Riemann posted to the BBC interview at 1:55 the interviewer reads the quote as the accepted answer has linked and his response is that "no, I've never said that. That's something that you've found on the internet. Doesn't mean that I've said it." Which is some pretty careful wording, as he doesn't say its fake but also doesn't acknowledge that he has said it. – akozi Jun 23 '23 at 15:39
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    @akozi For the sake of argument let's say it is somehow true that he never said it AND that it's "just something you've found on the internet" AND that the thing which was found verifiably was published on his website then what else is true for those things to be true? Off the top of my head, his website was hacked to say that AND someone else fixed that vandalism without telling him so that he is unaware that it was published to his website? – Dean MacGregor Jun 23 '23 at 15:58
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    @DeanMacGregor no, I totally get that and agree. I was just saying it seems like an answer that was probably prepped by his legally team on how to answer as he doesn't directly say its fake but does not acknowledge its validity. – akozi Jun 23 '23 at 16:18
  • Although closely related, I feel like there are multiple claims on this question: 1) are the screenshots real, or was the quoted text really posted on his website? (answered), and 2) did he himself write/say this? – Andrew T. Jun 23 '23 at 16:29
  • This sounds very much like the [court agruments](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/judge-slams-tesla-for-claiming-musk-quotes-captured-on-video-may-be-deepfakes/) that any famous person will have deep fake videos made of them and you cannot take any published statements attributed to them as factual. The arguments that the statements might have been made in front of hundreds of people is Irreverent. – doneal24 Jun 23 '23 at 20:12
  • I wonder what "job" means in this context? Assuming that the quote is accurate, does it mean "the objective I set myself", or "what I was being paid to do"? – Mark Morgan Lloyd Jun 25 '23 at 07:50
  • It means that he set himself to do that, because later the girls would go on webcam and in that way he would make money, and this was all his own business (he did not have a boss) – Riemann Jun 25 '23 at 10:59

2 Answers2

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Yes, it was on his website

But the process to verify that is convoluted, so bear with me:

  1. The quote was posted to his website (cobratate.com)
  2. Someone backed that page up to the Internet Archive in January 2022 (archive.org)
  3. worms cited posted a link to that Internet Archive page on Twitter, creating a Twitter short link in December 2022 (t.co)
  4. Google cached that Twitter link, so it shows up when you search (webcache.googleusercontent.com)
  5. I backed that Google cache up to a different archiving service, since it's the only site that will archive those pages (archive.today)

Here is a screenshot I took of the quote:

The quote on Archive.is

According to the BBC, the original page (#1) was removed in February 2022, and at some point, it was also "excluded from the Wayback Machine" (#2), which also made the t.co redirect (#3) break. While Google cache (#4) has a copy, that too will go away once it realizes the page was removed.

Laurel
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    I am just posting this comment as an independent eye-witness for when the links stop working and this answer becomes unconfirmable: As of today, the [webcache](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://t.co/ShoE0oI5A3) shows what appears to be an Internet Archive page of the CobraTate page, describing "The PHD Program", with a bio of Andrew Tate (in the first person) and includes the quote. I haven't confirmed that the t.co link has *always* pointed to the Internet Archive for CobraTate, but that would be the most prosaic assumption. – Oddthinking Jun 23 '23 at 00:25
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    Is there any guarantee that the cached twitter short link is actually from wayback machine? Couldn't someone replicate the wayback machine page (with `https://www.cobratate.com/phd-program` in the textbox) and make a twitter shortlink pointing to that page which google then caches? – Cave Johnson Jun 23 '23 at 06:40
  • Does this therefore mean that the above page was added on Tate's website by an external unauthorized user, or does it mean that he added the page? Or is there no way to know? – joseph h Jun 23 '23 at 07:02
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    Is there any explanation as to why it was excluded from the Wayback Machine? – Stef Jun 23 '23 at 08:57
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    Anyone can request their own website to be excluded from the Wayback Machine – Riemann Jun 23 '23 at 10:37
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    @CaveJohnson It's not possible to save a new value. I also found the guy on Twitter who posted the link *and* screenshots of the page (from Reddit), which then enjoyed some popularity on Twitter — nobody commented that there was any mismatch between the link and the screenshots. – Laurel Jun 23 '23 at 12:08
  • @Laurel Yes but that guy on twitter could have originally saved the short link using a manipulated webpage. I'm just saying it's not as airtight as I would have liked. – Cave Johnson Jun 23 '23 at 17:37
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    Apparently the Wayback Machine archives itself?!? This still works, and doesn't depend on t.co or Google: https://web.archive.org/web/20230416212507/https://web.archive.org/web/20220108225827/https://www.cobratate.com/phd-program – benrg Jun 24 '23 at 01:46
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    @benrg Brilliant. Waybackception. – Cave Johnson Jun 24 '23 at 05:36
  • @benrg Can the wayback machine request to be excluded from the wayback machine? – Comic Sans Strikephim Jun 24 '23 at 11:16
  • @ComicSansStrikephim There might be other ways, but my experience is that a website- or area of a website- which has appropriate content in robots.txt can't be looked up on the Wayback Machine: even if it's there. The implication is that the original request via the WM front page is checked, and that probably doesn't recurse. – Mark Morgan Lloyd Jun 25 '23 at 07:21
  • However not all wayback pages are archived: for example the wayback page of google is not: https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://web.archive.org/web/20230625101451/https://www.google.com/ – Riemann Jun 25 '23 at 11:08
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In an interview with Tripp Kramer, Tate says something similiar to the description of the PHD program. At 6:05 in the video Andrew Tate LIED he says:

That teaches basically how I got girls, how I met girls, how I got girls to like me, how I got girls to fall in love with me, to work on webcam for me.

Laurel
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