Stefan Molyneux
no lnx
ref
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/04/17/hate-groups-and-racist-pundits-spew-covid-19-misinformation-social-media-despite-companies
Hate groups and racist pundits have pushed misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube throughout the crisis, despite companies pledging to fight fake news about the virus.
Among some of the false claims propagated on social media include the notion – based on unproven race science – that persons of East Asian descent were predisposed to suffer from COVID-19, erroneous assertions that the virus was originally designed to be a bioweapon and arguments supporting the idea that racism can protect against global pandemics.
Hatewatch has chosen to repeat some of these posts in full to demonstrate the nature of the problem.
This deluge of COVID-19-related misinformation cuts against a pledge made by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in February 2020, when representatives from some of the world’s largest tech companies convened with members of the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss tampering the spread of false information related to the virus. The group was gathered, in part, in response to what a representative from the WHO dubbed an “infodemic” in an interview with CNBC – the new wave of false information on major social media platforms.
Groups such as Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have pushed to bridge this gap. Change the Terms advocates for social media companies to adopt a reasonable standard of care regarding regulation, which aims to constrain hate activity without stifling communities arbitrarily. But there is work yet to be done. Companies, as the 2019 “Year in Hate” report found, still struggle “to prioritize public safety over the freedom of their users to post extremist content.” The moderation of hate groups across all platforms is often inconsistent as well. Some groups, such as white nationalist publication American Renaissance, have been banned from Twitter and Facebook for hate speech for years, but have nevertheless continued to operate on YouTube.
As Hatewatch found in a survey of numerous hate groups tracked by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project across three major social media platforms – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – racism and disinformation has continued to fester. In addition to spreading racist memes and fake news about Asian Americans and other minority groups, hate groups have used all three platforms to boost a slew of conspiracy theories, fake cures (including one that has resulted in a death in Arizona) and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
When considering the real-world threat posed by social media companies’ inability to enforce their own guidelines on misinformation and fake news, Chloe Colliver, the head of digital policy and strategy at ISD, told Hatewatch that “three main risks came to mind.” These included the risks posed not only to public health by the proliferation of fake cures, but also to institutions as a result of a preponderance of conspiracy theories. She also cited the danger of “target attacks” against minority groups and others.
“None of which are new,” she added. “They fit the patterns of platforms’ inability to deal with [these] specific kinds of attack and disinformation content.”
Most, if not all, of the groups spreading this content have been given a pass to do so under existing social media policies.
“Obviously, the historical reticence of these companies to promote evidence-based or expert information above other kinds of information has come back to bite [them] now, as we’ve seen,” Colliver continued. “The platforms themselves acknowledged that their policies aren’t up to scratch in a crisis like this.”
VDARE, a white nationalist site that has had a promotional page on Facebook since 2012, has seized upon this climate of instability to push its racist agenda. More than 50 posts on its promotional page referred to the epidemic in some capacity.
“There is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to [COVID-19] than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons,” one post from March 5 said. It included a link to an article from pseudonymous New York-based contributor “Lance Welton,” titled “Chinese Scientists Find MORE Evidence That Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) Discriminates By Race.”
“I’m sure the health authorities do have this information,” VDARE editor Peter Brimelow contended in an article posted to the site on March 12 as a follow up to “Welton’s” piece. Using debunked race science, Brimelow posited that COVID-19, as well as its predecessor, SARS, were “Oriental-specific.”
“Are some racial groups more prone to catching the Chinese pathogen – and are some races more severely affected when they do?” asked another Facebook post from March 31 – the same day officials announced that deaths in the United States had officially surpassed those of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The same post included a link to an article featuring a section titled “Coronovirus [sic] and the Mexican Race.”
VDARE, which has often referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan flu” (or “Wuflu”), defended Trump’s own use of the term on March 17 as well, arguing in a March 17 post that any opposition to such nomenclature was born out of a world where “white people are blamed for all . . . problems.”
Fake cures, not to mention misinformation regarding the source of the virus and government efforts to contain it, have been featured on a number of pages belonging to hate groups and extremist groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
WorldNetDaily (WND), a conspiracy-minded outlet and active antigovernment extremist group with over 840,000 likes on Facebook, has boosted a number of articles featuring antisemitic dog whistles, fake cures and other disinformation. Recent WND headlines include: “Coronavirus is being weaponized by Soros, others behind anti-Trump ads”; “Clyburn: Democrats must use Chinese virus to restructure America ‘to fit our vision’”; and “Newt Gingrich’s question for Biden exposes Obama’s undeniable role in N95 mask shortage.” Another proclaimed that a three-drug cocktail promoted by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko had a “100% success” rate in treating 350 patients with COVID-19. The article, which was shared to WND’s Facebook on March 24, includes an embedded video from Dr. Zelenko himself, which has since been removed by YouTube for violating community guidelines.
Though the particular combination of drugs – which includes hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment – has been used by some doctors, the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the drugs’ use has raised some concern, especially for patients who may attempt to administer them themselves.
On March 31, WND published an article titled “‘Cover-up’: Chinese researched bat virus near Wuhan market,” which posited that the virus may have originated in a research lab near Wuhan.
Several antigovernment groups, including militias, peppered their pages with misinformation implying that the virus would result in a communist takeover of essential industries and/or attacks on the Second Amendment. These fears are central to the antigovernment movement’s opposition to the “New World Order.” This far-reaching conspiracy theory, which features prominently in antigovernment and other far-right circles, posits that a small, secretive cadre of elites are behind a rising totalitarian, one-world government.
“We’re not going down the road that leads to tyranny, and that’s what this whole crisis is about,” James Stachowiak, otherwise known as “Johnny Infidel,” said on a video on Facebook that sought to inspire “lone wolves” to take action.
“KLAYMAN: LEFT USING COVID-19 TO INSTALL GOV’T DICTATORSHIP!,” screamed a post on Freedom Watch’s page – a group run by far-right extremist Larry Klayman – in a post from March 25.
Still others encouraged users to view the virus as a vast “globalist” conspiracy. This antisemitic euphemism is frequently used by groups such as WND and Infowars, and has its roots in the centuries-old antisemitic image of Jews as “puppeteers” in complete control of society. One post from anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively, published on March 22, claimed that the coronavirus outbreak had been “orchestrated” by the elites. Their goal, he contended, was to target “small business because it is a cornerstone of American self-sufficiency and serves as a barrier to the complete Marxist takeover of our society.”
“Now think of a country the size of China . . . and think of its multi-thousand-year habit of eating some very strange creatures – basically a zoo is a menu in China, it seems. What are the odds that coronavirus just happened to emerge within a stone’s throw – in a giant country – of its only level four bioweapons lab?” asked white nationalist YouTuber and self-proclaimed philosopher Stefan Molyneux in a video clip posted to his Twitter on March 30.
“The odds, of course, are virtually zero,” he said. He claimed the virus appeared to be “engineered,” possibly for “transmission and lethality.”
Molyneux – who runs a verified account on Twitter with over 450,000 followers – has spread racist or pseudoscientific disinformation about COVID-19 for weeks.
“Open borders guy reaps fruit of open borders,” he tweeted on March 7, after the head of Italy’s Democratic Party tested positive for the virus.
Then, on March 25, Molyneux released a video accusing the media of turning “attention away from the mass infiltration of academia, of media, of Hollywood, [and] of real estate [by] Chinese citizens, often with illicit money from the criminal actions of the Chinese government.”
Finally, when asked by a follower why German hospitals weren’t “overwhelmed,” Molyneux encouraged followers on March 26 to “go look up average IQ by country.”
Molyneux, a well-known proponent of scientific racism, has as recently as Oct. 7, 2019, stated that the “average IQ in Syria is 83. Turkey is 90. They will never ever be like the West.” In 2018, he also cited “racial IQ differences” as a method to “push back against Third World immigration without succumbing to racism.”
Molyneux has made his affinity for a white “monoculture,” to borrow his term, widely known. In late 2018, Molyneux said he had endeared himself to white nationalist beliefs after visiting Poland, which he referred to as “an all-white country,” according to a Right Wing Watch report from Dec. 21, 2018.
Other prominent far-right accounts have sought to downplay the threat posed to Americans by the virus in various ways.
Far-right social media personality and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe produced a series of videos featuring him driving to different COVID-19 testing sites and hospitals in the New York City metro area on March 27. The videos, which were published on both O’Keefe’s personal Twitter with over 710,000 followers, as well as Project Veritas’s verified account with some 460,000 followers, include O’Keefe pressing a national guardsman to call the media coverage of the crisis “overblown.”
Though one of the videos was removed from O’Keefe’s Facebook on April 1, they remain on Twitter.
VDARE, which has evaded waves of Twitter bans targeting white nationalists, advertised on April 3 that they had created a “special archive” for posts related to COVID-19 and race. According to the white nationalist site, the “race-denying ruling class” – as one author called them in a March 28 article quoted on Twitter on April 1 – has supposedly denied the role of pseudoscientific racial differences in the spread of the disease.
“Ruling Class concedes it’s ok to Notice that Coronavirus discriminates by gender, but NOT that it discriminates by race. Why?” the account tweeted on Feb. 21.
VDARE also pushed the same anti-Asian rhetoric that has led to a wave of hate crimes across the country. “575,000+ Chinese call NYC home,” it posted on March 22, along with a link to an article titled “Is NYC Coronavirus Ground Zero Because Massive ‘Be Strong Wuhan’ Feb 9th Chinese New Year’s Parade Helped Spread the Chinese Virus?”
Twitter has, at times, cracked down on disinformation on the platform. On March 25, Twitter removed a post from the far-right site the Federalist, which advocated for spreading the virus through “chickenpox parties.” A March 27 tweet from Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, which echoed the president’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, has since been removed from the platform for a terms of service violation. Two tweets from the far-right populist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, were removed on March 30 for spreading misinformation.
YouTube
“We actually have sound, instinctive reasons to be xenophobes,” American Renaissance head Jared Taylor told viewers in a YouTube video posted on March 12. He continued:
Everyone knows about the body’s immune system, which fights disease. We also have a behavioral immune system. All people everywhere instinctively avoid certain things that could make us sick. Piles of feces. Rotting flesh. People with running sores. Part of this behavioral immune system is an instinctive fear that people who act or look strange could be carrying disease.
“Xenophobia,” Taylor concluded, “can save your life.”
Taylor followed up on March 27, noting in a video titled “What the Virus Means for Us” that “everything teaches ‘identitarian’ lessons, including the coronavirus.”
“Professor Giorgio Palu, former president of the European Society of Virology, says that early on there was a proposal to isolate people coming from China, but they didn’t do that because people would’ve said that was ‘racist.’ Professor Polu believes that a large level of the devastation [in Italy] was caused by that: fear of being called racist,” Taylor said later in the same video.
Though Palu did acknowledge that a proposal to “isolate people coming from China” was shot down in a statement to CNN on March 18, he also explained that the breadth of Italy’s outbreak arose from the government lagging on both testing and enforcing lockdowns.
Despite being banned from Twitter since 2018, American Renaissance’s YouTube channel and its 126,000 subscribers have remained.
Jason Köhne, a white nationalist podcaster and vlogger known online as “No White Guilt,” blamed “anti-whiteism” not only for coronavirus spreading throughout the United States, but also for ensuring that many medicines and medical products were produced abroad.
“This is an anti-white issue,” he said in a video posted on March 24. “You can say there’s an economic component to it, but the bottom line is that the . . . incentivization structures have been put in place to capitalize on the harm inflicted on Western kind.”
Molyneux,meanwhile, used his channel to flesh out the idea, also propagated on his Twitter, that the virus was a “bioweapon.”
“[COVID-19] is kind of like the perfect virus from a weaponization standpoint, and if it was related to eating bats, it’s not like people in China started eating bats last October,” he said in a podcast from Jan. 25.
In a live stream aired March 27, Molyneux, along with his guest, Dr. Paul Cottrell, who received his Ph.D. in finance from the online, for-profit school, Walden University, discussed whether “the Wuhan virus is the bioweapon” that Cottrell contended had leaked out of a lab near Wuhan in 2015. Molyneux later pondered whether the virus’s spread throughout the world ought to be considered an act of “manslaughter” or even “homicide,” presumably on China’s part.
A day later, in a now-unlisted YouTube video linked to on Molyneux’s Twitter he declared a sort of victory for the racist, anti-immigrant right.
“All the people who were called ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’ for wanting to talk about immigration – who said that it was possible to stop it relatively easily – they’ve all been proven right,” he said in the March 28 video.
“Now the walls go up because it affects those in power,” he said
==
919 rww
...YouTube has shown itself to be particularly susceptible to pressure campaigns organized by the far-right. Last year, the site apologized and retracted strikes against far-right “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube account after he urged his fans to contact YouTube on his behalf.
==
evans behind bastards says joe rogan exper interview red pill?
eg
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xq_ZYB8rew
1.
Jan 6, 2014 - Uploaded by PowerfulJRE
Stefan Molyneux is a Canadian philosopher. He runs the #1 philosophy show on the internet, Freedomain ...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFxU5veg0Cw
1.
Sep 24, 2013 - Uploaded by PowerfulJRE
Stefan Molyneux is a Canadian philosopher. He runs the #1 philosophy show on the internet, Freedomain ...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTRY7pUdENw
1.
Aug 21, 2014 - Uploaded by PowerfulJRE
Stefan Molyneux is a Canadian philosopher. He runs the #1 philosophy show on the internet, Freedomain ...
==
huh?
https://www.fdrliberated.com/the-day-joe-rogan-discovered-the-real-stefan-molyneux/
many lies?
==
rww
Stefan Molyneux is telling his YouTube subscribers, many of whom consume his content as if it were gospel, that the Mueller investigation was used by Democrats to freeze the Trump administration while a plan was enacted to import “Third World” immigrants who would vote for Democrats.
Molyneux is a white nationalist YouTube personality (and alleged cult leader) and therefore interprets almost every major news and cultural phenomena through the lens of a conspiracy theory in which Democrats and other left-leaning forces are trying to erase white people from the planet through mass immigration. He made no exception to this tendency while interpreting the news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had delivered the findings of his investigation into Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election to the Department of Justice.
In a
uploaded this weekend to Molyneux‘s YouTube channel—which has more than 900,000 subscribers—he said that Democrats had spent so much time discussing and speculating about the Mueller investigation so that they could avoid addressing what Molyneux believes to be the real reason Democrats lost the 2016 election: their support of immigrants.
“The left have been trying to import people from the Third World who are going to reliably vote for bigger and bigger government, more and more socialism, more and more income redistribution and greater expansions of government powers, and they’ve been doing this since 1965, since the immigration act,” Molyneux said.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is a frequent target of white nationalists ire, as they believe the law’s abolishment of racial and national quotas on immigration has devastated the United States. Many right-wing figures believe a slightly watered-down version of this sentiment; they allege that immigration policies are being used to create a reliably Democratic voting base.
“The left, the Democrats, they can’t address concerns about immigration because immigration is their path to gaining and maintaining power ad infinitum—well, at least until immigration produces the inevitable collapse,” Molyneux said. “The one issue that got Trump elected is the one issue the left can’t touch.”
“They were terrified that Trump would do something to reduce even legal immigration and do something to control illegal immigration and so because they were terrified of that—and time is on their side—all they have to do is maintain the status quo and within one or two election cycles, the Republican Party is dead. The Republic is dead.” Molyneux continued. “They know time is on their side. All they need to do is stall any Republican capacity to control immigration or reduce immigration or reverse immigration in terms of illegal immigration.”
He added, “Because time is on their side, the Russia collusion investigation is a foundational tool to paralyze the Trump administration as more and more people come pouring into America.”
==
The “MAGA Movement” comprises bunches of pro-Trump pundits and social media personalities who use their followings to gin up support for the president in the face of all criticism. Last week, they attempted to rile up their supporters at a conference in the nation’s capital city.
The event, calling itself the American Priority Conference, appeared to be well-financed with its stage setup, conference space rental and speakers lineup, but it still reportedly drew less than 100 attendees at its peak. Attendance was so low that one of the event’s headline speakers, Stefan Molyneux, canceled his talk after arriving at the conference and witnessing the dismal turnout. In photos from the event, rows of seats remained empty, even as newsworthy speakers like GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone spoke at the conference.
...
==
rww
Stefan Molyneux is a cult figure and a white nationalist sympathizer who peddles what he claims to be unvarnished philosophical truths and self-help advice to his hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers. But there’s an apparent problem with his posturing as a philosopher king: He doesn’t seem to have many original thoughts.
Molyneux is the architect of “Free Domain Radio,” a platform he founded in 2006 that hawks Molyneaux’s “essential philosophy” to its fan base, which includes large numbers of young people. His style of philosophy is derivative of other right-wing thinkers and frequently serves as a vehicle for rhetoric stemming from the far right. Molyneux has hosted myriad right-wing personalities for interviews on his platform, including
, conspiracy theorists, and several
to
. CNN reported that Rep. Steve King of Iowa appeared on Molyneux’s podcast last year.
In addition to cultural commentary and interviews, Molyneux uses his YouTube channel to distribute academic-styled dives into philosophical topics and political issues. But some people have noticed that Molyneux’s lectures fail to meet basic academic standards regarding citations, and often contain entire passages read verbatim from secondary sources as if they were Molyneux’s own pontifications and findings. In the description section of some of his videos, Molyneux will provide hyperlinks to outside sources but does not disclose that he is often reading from those sources verbatim. By academic standards, that makes Molyneux a plagiarist.
Liberal YouTube commentary channel The Liberal Sanity Project,
instances of Molyneux’s apparent plagiarism in a video published to YouTube on December 5. Liberal Sanity Project told us that they researched the video by running transcripts of Molyneux videos through anti-plagiarism software.
Those instances of plagiarism were further researched by Stuart K. Hayashi, who found another instance of Molyneux using work from other sources without proper attribution in a video uploaded just four days ago. Hayashi points out that Molyneux read entire passages of text from Zero Hedge, Areo Magazine, The New Criterion, and The Epoch Times— the latter without as much as a link in the video’s description.
Their research was independently verified by Right Wing Watch.
....
==
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/youtube-retracts-strikes-from-stefan-molyneuxs-account/
rww
Libertarian pseudo-philosopher turned far-right political pundit Stefan Molyneux received two strikes on his
YouTube account for violating community content guidelines, but after fans pressured the site, YouTube reversed the strikes and apologized.
Molyneux is one of the leading purveyors of far-right indoctrination on YouTube, where he hosts thousands of videos bashing ,” espousing
, fearmongering about immigrants, and engaging in rampant misogyny. He also peddles white nationalist tropes about
and has promoted the idea of “white genocide” happening in
, which is not happening.
Molyneux is also an alleged cult leader who has used his Free Domain Radio site to encourage people to isolate themselves from their families, a process he dubbed 
.” According to allegations from former Free Domain Radio members, Molyneux has coerced his inner-circle supporters into divulging their personal grievances,
them that their frustrations stem from their parents, and eventually encouraged them to abandon their families.
On Twitter, Molyneux said the strikes against his videos came “likely as a result of a mass flagging campaign,” citing no proof of that assumption, and urged his fans to contact YouTube “and alert them to this injustice.” He writes in a statement attached to a tweet, “It’s not too late to save philosophy.” Molyneux claimed one video that received a strike was called 
” and the other featured an interview with the zealous hate monger Katie Hopkins.
...Within 24 hours, my@YouTube channel has received two community guidelines strikes - likely as a result of a mass flagging campaign - and is now on the verge of total deletion.
Please respectfully contact @TeamYouTube and alert them to this injustice.
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The outrage campaign was further prodded by conservative pundits Michelle Malkin, self-described “New Right” personality Mike Cernovich, alt-right philosopher Theodore 
” Beale, and the right-wing outlet Big League Politics.
YouTube community guidelines state that if “the primary purpose of the content is to incite hatred against a group of people solely based on their ethnicity,” then it is forbidden. The site policies also offer protections for protected classes, including gender, religion, and sexual orientation and it could easily be argued, based on the abusive behavior of large swaths of Molyneux’s fan base online, that much of his work has successfully ginned up hate against racial minorities and immigrants, transgender people, and Muslims.
It took less than 7 hours for YouTube to reverse course:
Update: both videos are now reinstated and the strike resolved. Thanks again for raising this!
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Tags: Katie HopkinsStefan MolyneuxNew RightYouTubeFree Domain Radio
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 closely
“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 from
(760,000 views!) to
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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On the coattails of President Donald Trump’s successful election campaign and an anti-"political correctness" wave, an alternative right-wing media echo chamber successfully reverberated itself into virtual relevance on social media, where it now reaches millions of people every day. This new-media ecosystem exists outside of traditional newspapers and cable news networks, instead taking to social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, Reddit, and YouTube to promote its far-right nationalist politics and conspiracy-laden worldviews to an audience it has isolated and now dominates as its preferred news source.
Key players in this circular far-right alt-media echo chamber, such as online troll Mike Cernovich and Infowars’ Alex Jones, have successfully crafted a false impression of credibility. They have synthesized a “new right” echo chamber from “alt-right” ideologies and orchestrated a media machine that disseminates content across multiple media platforms with extreme efficiency.
Key voices in this ecosystem often work a redundant media circuit across allied platforms to reinforce each other’s worldviews and concepts of reality, cast doubt on mainstream media, and suggest widespread conspiracies along the way. Cernovich demonstrated this tactic as he circulated a faux scandal story that suggested Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser to former President Barack Obama, was responsible for improper unmasking of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials.
Cernovich toured the Rice story around the alternative media sphere he occupies until it eventually broke into mainstream media. On April 2, Cernovich first tweeted the “breaking news” that Rice had ordered the unmasking. Later that day, Cernovich published his full story about the explosive allegations. On April 3, Cernovich promoted the story in a livestream broadcast to his tens of thousands of Periscope followers. The same day, “alt-right” thought leader Richard Spencer publicly slammed Cernovich in his own broadcast, granting the story a direct platform into the "alt-right" fanbase. On April 4, Cernovich took his story through the alternative media circuit, appearing on Infowars and Free Domain Radio and earning shoutouts from Stefan Molyneux, Lee Stranahan, and Donald Trump Jr. After riding the wave, Cernovich continued his self-promotion in a Reddit AMA thread and a post-story interview with Rebel Media.
Members of the echo chamber attract and maintain a fan base by developing an abusive relationship with their audience members -- a process they label “redpilling.” They gaslight their audiences until readers and viewers feel unable to trust any media other than those particular outlets to deliver them “the truth.” As a result, these new-media companies have groomed rabid fan bases that turn to them as beacons of honesty in a media world that they believe is orchestrated to distract the public from this echo chamber’s version of “the truth.”
Many media outlets disregard this new-media echo chamber, continuing to speak about the movement with the same blanket terms and condescension they used before the so-called “new right” distanced itself from “alt-right” leaders. But now, months later, this far-right alternative media apparatus is encroaching on its mainstream competition online. For example, Infowars recently surpassed CNN in its number of subscribers on YouTube, which marked a major milestone in far-right alternative media's encroachment on the video site’s news ecosystem.
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early 2016, about half of people age 49 and under said they get their news online. And as cable news viewership declines and as Americans’ trust in news media sinks to an all-time low, alternative new-media stars have leveraged a unique opportunity to redefine right-wing media and reach mass audiences once loyal to established journalism outlets. The alternative media ecosystem has also benefited from attention from top government officials and those close to them; presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway recently elevated Cernovich on Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. pushed an Infowars conspiracy theory, and Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s former national security advisor, has promoted Infowars and conspiracy theories like “Pizzagate” sourced from the alternative media sphere.