AS I HAVE MENTIONED over and over again, the prevalence (that’s a bit of understatement there) and virulence of rightwingnuts on various social media on the Internet—how they inject hate and fear here, there, and everywhere. I thought I’d let someone with a bigger pulpit reiterate some of my points: in October 2017, Right Wing Watch featured “White Supremacy Figured Out How To Become YouTube Famous” by Jared Holt.
The article opens by informing the readers what the reader should already know by now: that extremist rightwingnuts—and there’s a redundancy!—are all over the internet, especially YouTube:
“YouTube is home to a seemingly endless variety of videos that reach all kinds of viewers and is creeping up on TV as the most watched video platform in the United States. But as John Herrman documented in The New York Times Magazine last month, political punditry on YouTube is vastly dominated by right-wing talkers.”
Right Wing Watch provided a table of contents to the article’s four sections:
1. Extremists Are Using YouTube To Spread Hate
2. Tensions Rise, Bloggers Flee As YouTube’s Efforts To Combat Extremism Begin
3. The Extremists Using YouTube To Get Famous
4. People Who Enable The Hate
Cartoon by Adam Zyglis for The Buffalo News.
To inject hateful rhetoric
The point of this article here is to get you to go there! So I will add nothing more than a few paragraphs from Holt’s piece as a teaser:
“As a platform, YouTube has served as an alternative media ecosystem apart from the mainstream where any person can contribute to national conversation and reach thousands of people overnight. But the Right’s overt domination of the platform, in addition to political forums on Reddit and 4chan, has created an environment where white nationalists and right-wing extremists can easily inject hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories into national political discourse by positioning themselves alongside less overtly hateful rising right-wing media personalities.
These extremists roleplay as modern-day shock-jock radio hosts as they insert their sexist, racist, bigoted rhetoric—which they excuse by saying they are trying to ‘trigger’ liberals and fight for ‘free speech’—into the existing stream of right-wing commentary on YouTube.”
Of course that t’s why they’re posting all these racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim remarks: to protect free speech for the good of America, if not all mankind …
Readers should know that white nationalists and extremists are all over YouTube. Click To Tweet
FEATURED IMAGE: “The scene that drew residents of Central Park Avenue just south of Foster Avenue [in Chicago] to their front porches on August 16, 1921, was eerily reminiscent of The Birth of a Nation, the film that celebrated the night-riding vigilantes who restored white supremacy to the post-Civil War South: Thousands of men in white gowns and hoods exchanged ritual handshakes and piled into a long line of cars headed for a secret destination in the northern suburbs.” (Chicago Tribune)
It seems like they have been with us forever, and at times it seems like they will be with us forever. It also seems like we need to be alert to their covert presence in the media more than we do their overt presence on the streets.