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not heard from in a while? 7 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/manipulated-video-biden-awarding-medal-honor-gets-millions-views-social-media

mma 7 22

no lnx twit pix vid

misleading manipulated video of President Joe Biden awarding the Medal of Honor to a veteran has received millions of views on social media platforms. The video has spread on multiple platforms, including Twitter, even though the platform seemingly prohibits this kind of deceptive content.

On July 5, Biden awarded the Medal of Honor to four veterans for their service during the Vietnam War. He bestowed the honor by putting the medal around their necks, as is normal procedure for awarding government medals.

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A grainy and blurry version of a clip in which Biden put the medal around one of the veterans, Dwight Birdwell, started circulating on social media platforms, with users falsely claiming that the president put the medal on backwards. A Media Matters review has found that the video has received more than 3.4 million views on mainstream platforms.

The vast majority of those views have been on Twitter, where just one upload of the video had at least 2.3 million views. Other uploads on the platform have also received hundreds of thousands of combined views. Multiple right-wing figures have also shared the video on Twitter as an accurate depiction of the ceremony, including thechairperson of the Texas Republican Party, a Newsmax host, and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson.}:

[Drebonacci Twitter video]

Twitter rules prohibit “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” If the platform does not remove the content, then it “may provide additional context on Tweets sharing the misleading media where they appear on Twitter,” which includes applying “a label and/or warning message to the Tweet.” Thus far, the uploads of the video have not been removed, nor has a label been put on them. Twitter has previously struggled to consistently enforce its labeling policy.

The spread of the video was not limited to Twitter. Multiple uploads of the video have gone up on YouTube, including a YouTube Short of the video with more than 170,000 views. YouTube rules prohibit “content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users (beyond clips taken out of context) and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.”

YouTube Short Biden medal video views

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/paul-joseph-watson-i-hate-conspiracy-theories

Paul Joseph Watson, a right-wing YouTube creator and editor-at-large at the prolific conspiracy theory outlet Infowars, wants you to forget the last decade of his career and to now believe he doesn’t like conspiracy theories.

:{In }an interview:{ uploaded yesterday to }:Dennis Prager’s digital media outlet PragerU,:{ Watson joined conservative commentator Candace Owens on her podcast to discuss issues of social media moderation as interpreted through the right-wing lens that defines it as “censorship.” Watson was banned from Facebook earlier this year.}:

During the interview, Watson took issue with how the media has characterized the content he produces, often identifying him as a conspiracy theorist and sympathetic to the alt-right. Watson rejected being considered alt-right, since he said he does not believe in the pursuit of a white ethnostate, and similarly rejected being called a conspiracy theorist.

“I hate conspiracy theories. I think most of them are really dumb,” Watson said.

Owens chimed in that she doesn’t watch CNN because it’s a “conspiracy theorist network.” It’s worth noting that Owens got her start in right-wing media thanks in part to an in-studio appearance she made on Alex Jones’ Infowars show while she still operated under the moniker “Red Pill Black.”

Watson said, “I was a conspiracy theorist when I was a kid, like 15 years ago. That’s where I came from, so I know how those ideas—you take disparate bits of information and fuse them together to create a conspiracy. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some conspiracies. But I know how they’re created and I know mentally how people are lulled into believing them.”

After making his claim, Watson maintained his newfound anti-conspiracy theory position for about 10 minutes. Then, Watson and Owens theorized that tech companies were banning right-wing figures from their platforms because they are involved in a conspiracy to silence political dissidents and enforce homogeneous political thought.

Watson appeared in-studio on Infowars in March to talk about a new project he was working on to “generate the next generation of YouTubers, of young political commentators."

[vid]

Tags: Candace OwensPaul Joseph Watsonconspiracy theoriessocial mediaPragerU

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/03/11/infowars-paul-joseph-watson-launching-new-project-generate-next-generation-youtubers/223087

far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson announced the launch “probably within the next two weeks” of a new project that aims to “generate the next generation of YouTubers, of young political commentators.”

While appearing on Infowars program The Alex Jones Showon March 5, Watson said that his project will still involve “working together” with Infowars and that the two entities are “still going to be affiliated.” While host Alex Jones and many of his primary Infowars channels are banned from YouTube, Watson currently maintains a YouTube page with more than 1.5 million subscribers.

during Watson’s appearance, Jones said that he had been working with Watson for 18-19 years and that he was “excited” about the new project, saying, “That’s what successful operations do is they spawn new things, and I think in time you will also spawn apprentices as well.” Attempting to dismiss speculation of infightingbetween Jones and Watson, Jones said that the project was “pretty much my idea.”

Watson described his project as “an exciting new operation, it’s going to be where all my material is housed, and hopefully longer term we’re going to get more writers on board and organically grow it into a larger news org,” adding that he is “hoping to, you know, generate the next generation of YouTubers, of young political commentators.”

While for a time Watson was best known for being a conspiracy theorist and source of sometimes hilariously incorrect information, his commentary has taken a darker turn in recent years. In a 2018 interview with The Daily Beast, Alex Jones’ ex-wife Kelly Jones said of Infowars, “They’ve transmogrified into little white supremacists which is alarming crap,” and “Paul’s white supremacy is growing -- I know it’s a difficult issue, this refugee crisis -- but they are actively encouraging white supremacy.” Indeed, months before the deadly 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, Watson interviewed the event’s organizer, Jason Kessler, about “anti-white racism."

Watson’s new project appears to be the latest effort of Infowars to get its brand of toxic commentary before a younger audience on a platform where the outlet is largely banned. On February 27, Jones made a nearly five-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s show The Joe Rogan Experience during which he ranted and pushedoutlandish conspiracy theories. The appearance has drawn more than 10 million views and Rogan’s channel is monetized, meaning YouTube is profiting off of the video through ad revenue sharing. Likewise, newly hired Infowars personality Kaitlin Bennett made a February 25 appearance on massive YouTube star Logan Paul’s podcast. Like Rogan’s show, Paul’s podcast is monetized. Recapping her appearance with Jones on his program, Bennett gloated about sharing with Paul’s audience a “perspective on gun rights and the Second Amendment that they probably didn’t think they were ever going to watch.” Jones said he was “glad” Bennett appeared on the show because of its large audience and because it’s hosted by the “college kids that the tweenies and 13-year-olds look up to.” Jones also said he would like to appear on the show himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson

Paul Joseph Watson is an English YouTube personality and conspiracy theorist.[2][3][4][5] He has been described as 'alt-right' by multiple sources,[5][6][7][8] though he does not associate himself with that label,[9] instead identifying himself as a classical liberal. He publishes content that is critical of Islam, feminism, pop culture, and left-wing politics.[10]

He is the editor-at-large of InfoWars.com, an online publication that promotes conspiracy theories about American and international politics, and a contributor to Infowars' talk radio programme The Alex Jones Show, where he occasionally either hosts or co-hosts. Watson has been working on Infowars.com since October 2002.[11] As of August 2017, he has over one million subscribers on his political YouTube channel.[12]

Political stance

Watson described his formative moment as when, at the age of 18, he watched The Secret Rulers of the World, a documentary in which journalist Jon Ronson accompanied Alex Jones in infiltrating Bohemian Grove, a location where some conspiracy theorists believe that global elites plot the New World Order.

Watson, along with Jones and InfoWars as a whole, used to discuss conspiracy theories such as chemtrails, the New World Order and the Illuminati before switching to material against feminism, Islam, and left-wing politics.[10] In an interview, Watson recalled, "I've talked about some quite fruity things in the past in my younger days, in terms of conspiracy theories. We don't all believe what we believed ten years ago."[13] Watson has been described as a member of "the new far-right" by The New York Times, who wrote in August 2017 that his "videos are straightforward nativist polemics, with a particular focus on Europe" and also noted his opposition to modernist architecture and modern art.[14] Iman Abou Atta, the director of the anti-Islamophobia group Tell MAMA, has said that "Paul Joseph Watson has become 'the' nexus for anti-Muslim accounts that we have mapped...He has become an influencer in promoting information—much of it bizarre and untrue—which has been regurgitated by anti-Muslim and anti-migrant accounts time and time again."[15]

Watson previously described himself as a libertarian, and supported Ron Paul in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. In a 2016 tweet, he said he no longer considered himself a libertarian because Gary Johnson "made the term an embarrassment."[16] Watson has also referred to himself as a conservative, and he considers modern day conservatism to be a counter-cultural movement.[17] In a post to Facebook in November 2016, Watson differentiated between being a member of the "New Right," which he considers to be distinct from the alt-right. He claims that the alt-right "likes to fester in dark corners of sub-reddits and obsess about Jews, racial superiority and Adolf Hitler."[9] He and Mike Cernovich have feuded with figures such as Richard B. Spencer and David Duke who see white nationalism as necessary for the alt-right; the more nationalist part of the movement refers to the former as alt-lite.[18]

Although he endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Watson declared in a tweet on 6 April 2017 he was "officially OFF the Trump train" following the president's decision to launch missile strikes on Syria in response to a gas attack several days earlier, believing Trump had reneged on his promise to not intervene in Syria. After a decrease in Twitter followers occurred, he denied he had "turned on Trump," saying he was "off the Trump train in terms of Syria."[19] He declared in a separate tweet he would shift his focus on ensuring French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of the National Front would be elected in the 2017 election, in which she was ultimately defeated.[20]

In the media

In February 2017, he offered via Twitter to pay any journalist who thinks Sweden is safe to visit the country and stay in the "crime ridden migrant suburbs" of Malmö.[5][23] Many journalists took him up on the offer,[24][23] and Watson chose New York journalist and videographer Tim Pool, who was already planning a similar investigation.[25] Watson provided $2,000 USD to Pool for the trip.[25][23] Tim Pool also ran a fundraiser to fund an investigation into other 'no-go zones' in other areas of Sweden and Europe.[25]

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In 2016, he was an early proponent of the allegations that Hillary Clinton suffers from numerous serious medical conditions. Watson's part in the manufacture and popularization of the rumour was covered in the mainstream media as part of a discussion of the role of rumour and conspiracy theory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[21][2][22]

Personal life

In a November 2016 interview with The Tab, he described his adolescence as "not particularly conventional", claiming that he exercised for three hours each day and largely abstained from alcohol.[26]

References

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  1. Macbain, Hamish (1 March 2017). "Are these the faces of London's young 'alt-right'?". Evening standard magazine.
  2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-Vice_clinton_2-1) Cheadle, Harry (26 August 2016). "How Conspiracy Theories About Hillary Clinton's Health Went Mainstream". Vice. British conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson
  3. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Mark Townsend (February 11, 2017). "Britain's extremist bloggers helping the 'alt-right' go global, report finds". The Guardian. London-based Paul Watson, described as “editor, staff writer” for the conspiracy website InfoWars ... is named as a central disseminator of the conspiracy theory concerning Hillary Clinton having debilitating health issues ... During a series of unashamedly conspiratorial videos that were viewed millions of times, Watson, originally from Sheffield, suggested Clinton might have had syphilis, brain damage and Parkinson’s disease as well as alleging she was a drug abuser.
  4. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ David Weigel (August 28, 2017). "The alt-right's take on Clinton's speech: Botched, but legitimizing". Washington Post. For the alt-right and its allies ... the speech helped elevate a fringe. In videos, Jones and his colleagues at InfoWars portrayed her as a sickly, doddering figure of desperation. ... InfoWars contributor Paul Joseph Watson...
  5. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-BBC_5-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-BBC_5-2) "Alt-right editor challenges journalists to visit Sweden". BBC News. 2017-02-21. Retrieved 2017-08-10. Paul Joseph Watson, the UK-based editor of far-right conspiracy website Infowars
  6. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Alt-right commentator gets 'schooled' by historian over diversity in Roman Britain". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2017-08-20.
  7. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "The alt-right's views of Trump are getting kind of complicated after his Syria strike". 2017-04-10. Retrieved 2017-08-20.
  8. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "This Alt-Right Blogger Said Sweden Is Crime-Ridden And Now People Are Trolling Him With Memes". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2017-08-20.
  9. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-:1_9-1) Pearce, Matt. "The 'alt-right' splinters as supporters and critics agree it was white supremacy all along".
  10. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-wilson_10-1) Wilson, Jason (24 May 2017). "How rightwing pundits are reacting to the Manchester attack". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 June 2017. Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones’s British mini-me, has followed the same broad path that the rest of the organization has. He was never on the left, of course, but over time his commentary has focused less and less on the Illuminati and chemtrails, and more and more on pushing a stridently anti-Muslim, anti-feminist and anti-left message.
  11. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson can’t get anything right Salon
  12. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Moser, Bob (21 August 2017). "How YouTube Became the Worldwide Leader in White Supremacy". New Republic. Retrieved 23 August 2017.
  13. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^"Paul Joseph Watson FULL interview: Mass immigration, left-wing hate and Brexit". YouTube. 2017-09-08. Retrieved 2017-09-19.
  14. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Herrman, John (2017-08-03). "For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-08-03.
  15. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Hayden, Michael Edison (2018-01-04). "A Keith Ellison tweet mentioning "antifa" has spurred an Islamaphobic backlash across the alt-right". Newsweek. Retrieved 2018-01-14.
  16. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Lynch, Conor (23 December 2016). "Donald Trump and the libertarians: Why have so many people who claim to love freedom embraced a strongman?". Salon.
  17. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Walter, Damien (18 February 2017). "There's a very simple reason why the alt-right is not the new counterculture". The Independent.
  18. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "InfoWars' Big Alt-Right Breakup With Richard Spencer—and the KKK". The Daily Beast. 14 March 2017. Retrieved 3 June 2017.
  19. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Withey, Josh (8 April 2017). "Paul Joseph Watson in humiliating U-turn after losing hundreds of followers". indy100. Retrieved 14 April 2017.
  20. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Greenwood, Max (7 April 2017). "Syria strike disappoints Trump backers in media". The Hill. Retrieved 14 April 2017.
  21. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Jamieson, Amber (26 August 2016). "Conspiracy central: the activists painting Clinton as a sick, terrorist-friendly killer" – via The Guardian.
  22. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Collins, Ben (9 August 2016). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Is Hillary Dying' Hoax Started by Pal of Alex Jones".
  23. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-Local_Sweden_23-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-Local_Sweden_23-2) Roden, Lee (21 February 2017). "Far-right editor's offer to pay travel costs to 'crime-ridden Malmö' backfires as dozens accept". The Local Sweden.
  24. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Bowden, George (20 February 2017). "Paul Joseph Watson's Twitter Offer For Journalist Trip To Sweden Spectacularly Backfires". Huffington Post.
  25. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-malmo_huff_post_25-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Joseph_Watson#cite_ref-malmo_huff_post_25-2) Bowden, George (21 February 2017). "Paul Joseph Watson Comes Good On Twitter Offer To 'Investigate Malmo, Sweden, Crimes:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Huffington Post.
  26. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Worswick, Marie-Elise (7 November 2016). "Meet the pro-Trump YouTuber from Sheffield who's impacting the U.S. Election". The Tab.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/youtube-has-become-the-content-engine-of-the-internets-dark

buzzfeed

... Seaman is the Pizzagate King of the Internet.

On Twitter, Seaman posts dozens of messages a dayto his 66,000 followers, often about the secret cabal — including Rothschilds, Satanists, and the other nabobs of the New World Order — behind the nation’s best-known, super-duper-secret child sex ring under a DC pizza parlor.

But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “#PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”

Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.

His biography reads, in part, “I report the truth.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the major social platforms, most notably Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, have been forced to undergo painful, often public reckonings with the role they play in spreading bad information. How do services that have become windows onto the world for hundreds of millions of people square their desire to grow with the damage that viral false information, “alternative facts,” and filter bubbles do to a democracy?

And yet there is a mammoth social platform, a cornerstone of the modern internet with more than a billion active users every month, which hosts and even pays for a fathomless stock of bad information, including viral fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate speech of every kind — and it’s been held up to virtually no scrutiny: YouTube.

The entire contemporary conspiracy-industrial complex of internet investigation and social media promulgation, which has become a defining feature of media and politics in the Trump era, would be a very small fraction of itself without YouTube. Yes, the site most people associate with “Gangnam Style,” pirated music, and compilations of dachshunds sneezing is also the central content engine of the unruliest segments of the ascendant right-wing internet, and sometimes its enabler.

To wit, the conspiracy-news internet’s biggest stars, some of whom now enjoy *New Yorker*profiles and presidential influence, largely live on YouTube — some of them on the site's news channel. Infowars — whose founder and host, Alex Jones, claims Sandy Hook didn’t happen, Michelle Obama is a man, and 9/11 was an inside job — broadcasts to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. So does Michael “Gorilla Mindset” Cernovich. So too do a whole genre of lesser-known but still wildly popular YouTubers, people like Seaman and Stefan Molyneux (an Irishman closelyassociated with the popular “Truth About” format/maxresdefault.jpg)). As do a related breed of prolific political-correctness watchdogs like Paul Joseph Watson and Sargon of Akkad (real name: Carl Benjamin), whose videos focus on the supposed hypocrisies of modern liberal culture and the ways they leave Western democracy open to a hostile Islamic takeover. As do a related group of conspiratorial white-identity vloggers like Red Ice TV, which regularly hosts neo-Nazis in its videos.

“The internet provides people with access to more points of view than ever before," YouTube wrote in a statement. "When it comes to news, we have thousands of news publishers that present a variety of viewpoints available on our news house channel, http://www.youtube.com/news. The videos here are featured using criteria informed by, among other things, Google News. We're always taking feedback so we can continue to improve and present as many perspectives at a given moment in time as possible.”

...[eg]

all this is a far cry from the platform’s halcyon days of 2006 and George Allen’s infamous “Macaca” gaffe. Back then, it felt reasonable to hope the site would change politics by bypassing a rose-tinted broadcast media filter to hold politicians accountable. As recently as 2012, Mother Jones posted to YouTube hidden footage of Mitt Romney discussing the “47%” of the electorate who would never vote for him, a video that may have swung the election. But by the time the 2016 campaign hit its stride, and a series of widely broadcast, ugly comments by then-candidate Trump didn’t keep him out of office, YouTube’s relationship to politics had changed.

Today, it fills the enormous trough of right-leaning conspiracy and revisionist historical content into which the vast, ravening right-wing social internet lowers its jaws to drink.Shared widely everywhere from white supremacist message boards to chans to Facebook groups, these videos constitute a kind of crowdsourced, predigested ideological education, offering the “Truth” about everything fromMichelle Obama’s *real* biological sex (760,000 views!) towhy medieval Islamic civilization wasn’t actually advanced.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"/maxresdefault.jpg).

Frequently, the videos consist of little more than screenshots of a Reddit “investigation” laid out chronologically, set to ominous music.Other times, they’re very simple, featuring a man in a sparse room speaking directly into his webcam, or a very fast monotone narration over a series of photographs with effects straight out of iMovie.There’s a financial incentive for vloggers to make as many videos as cheaply they can; the more videos you make, the more likely one is to go viral. David Seaman’s videos typically garner more than 50,000 views and often exceed 100,000. Many of Seaman’s videos adjoin ads for major brands. A preroll ad for Asana, the productivity software, precedes a video entitled “WIKILEAKS: Illuminati Rothschild Influence & Simulation Theory”; before “Pizzagate: Do We Know the Full Scope Yet?!” it’s an ad for Uber, and before “HILLARY CLINTON'S HORROR SHOW,” one for a new Fox comedy. (Most YouTubers have no direct control over which brands' ads run next to their videos, and vice versa.)

This trough isn’t just wide, it’s deep. A YouTube search for the term “The Truth About the Holocaust” returns half a million results. The top 10 are all Holocaust-denying or Holocaust-skeptical. (Sample titles: “The Greatest Lie Ever Told,” which has 500,000 views; “The Great Jewish Lie”; “The Sick Lies of a Holocaust™ 'Survivor.'”) Say the half million videos average about 10 minutes. That works out to 5 million minutes, or about 10 years, of “Truth About the Holocaust.”

Meanwhile, “The Truth About Pizzagate” returns a quarter of a million results, including “PizzaGate Definitive Factcheck: Oh My God” (620,000 views and counting) and “The Men Who Knew Too Much About PizzaGate” (who, per a teaser image, include retired Gen. Michael Flynn and Andrew Breitbart).

Sometimes, these videos gohugely viral.“With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations” — an alarming 20-minute video about Muslim immigration to Europe featuring deceptive editing and debunked footage — received some 4 million views in late 2015 before being taken down by YouTube over a copyright claim. (Infowars: “YouTube Scrambles to Censor Viral Video Exposing Migrant Invasion.”) That’s roughly as many people as watched the Game of Thrones Season 3 premiere. It’s since been scrubbed of the copyrighted music and reuploaded dozens of times.

First circulated by white supremacist blogs and chans, “With Gates Wide Open” gained social steam until it was picked up by Breitbart, at which point it exploded, blazing the viral trail by which conspiracy-right “Truth” videos now travel. Last week, President Trump incensed the nation of Sweden by falsely implying that it had recently suffered a terrorist attack. Later, he clarified in a tweet that he was referring to a Fox News segment. That segment featured footage from a viral YouTube documentary, Stockholm Syndrome, about the dangers of Muslim immigration into Europe. Sources featured in the documentary have since accused its director, Ami Horowitz, of “bad journalism” for taking their answers out of context.

So what responsibility, if any, does YouTube bear for the universe of often conspiratorial, sometimes bigoted, frequently incorrect information that it pays its creators to host, and that is now being filtered up to the most powerful person in the world? Legally, per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which absolves service providers of liability for content they host, none. But morally and ethically, shouldn’t YouTube be asking itself the same hard questions as Facebook and Twitter about the role it plays in a representative democracy? How do those questions change because YouTube is literally paying people to upload bad information?

And practically, if YouTube decided to crack down, could it really do anything?

YouTube does**“demonitize” videos that it deems “not advertiser-friendly,**” and last week, following a report in the Wall Street Journal that Disney had nixed a sponsorship deal with the YouTube superstar PewDiePie over anti-Semitic content in his videos, YouTube pulled his channel from its premium ad network. But such steps have tended to follow public pressure and have only affected extremely famous YouTubers. And it’s not like PewDiePie will go hungry; he can still run ads on his videos, which regularly do millions of views.

Ultimately, the platform may be so huge as to be ungovernable: Users upload 400 hours of video to YouTube every minute. One possibility is drawing a firmer line between content the company officially designates as news and everything else; YouTube has a dedicated News vertical that pulls in videos from publishers approved by Google News.

Even there, though, YouTube has its work cut out for it. On a recent evening, the first result I saw under the “Live Now - News” subsection of youtube.com/news was the Infowars “Defense of Liberty 13 Hour Special Broadcast.” Alex Jones was staring into the camera

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