Debunking The Narrative Of Right Wing Radicalization On Youtube
In September a report was published by Data and Society making false claims about people like me, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. The report claimed that Youtube was radicalizing young people toward the extreme right. The story was carried by almost every mainstream media outlets and pushed as fact, even though there was no data. It may just be that, like PewDiePie, the left is looking to smear anyone using a competitor or is opposed to their ideology of social justice.But new data has emerged from Software Engineer Mark Ledwich which disproves this narrative. There is no clear path to radicalization. In fact you could argue that if politics is flowing in any direction, it is to the left.Left wing channels get more than double the views of right wing channels on youtube, and the idea of radicalization is simply false and in all likelihood a smear against those who oppose intersectional feminist and the regressive left.
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In September, a report was published called Alternative Influence Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube.
The report makes many claims about what's going on with YouTube and a group it calls the Alternative Influence Network.
They say it's an assortment of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities who use YouTube to promote a range of political positions from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism All the way to overt white nationalism.
One of the most notorious images was this red line sort of conspiracy crime web showing various creators and how they're connected.
But as it turns out, this is not real data.
This was actually more of an opinion piece where there's no clear methodology to how any of this was discovered.
In fact, many of the lines between creators in this graph are in fact fake.
The general narrative from this report is that there's a path to radicalization for people who go on YouTube.
And this kind of rhetoric is being repeated by many mainstream news sources.
But it would seem that this might actually just be partisan fighting.
That the real reason many of these journalists and news organizations are pushing the narrative of radicalization is because they themselves are entrenched in some aspect of the culture war.
This idea of a left versus a right, which isn't exactly accurate, but there is a clear dividing line in an opposition to what some people would call regressive behavior, or the regressive left.
Now naturally, those aligned with this group believe certain things about an ideology called intersectional feminism, and they're going to call anyone who doesn't right-wing, which doesn't actually make sense when you consider that someone like myself would criticize left-wing identitarianism, but also support left-wing social policy.
Where that puts me, well, it gets quite confusing.
But a software engineer named Mark Ledwich recently put together a program that tracks recommendations on YouTube, and he drafted this report on Medium.
He opens the report by talking about YouTube Rewind, which became the most disliked video in the history of YouTube in only eight days.
He said speculation flowed as to why the video was so badly received, including a recent article by Kevin Roos of the New York Times.
He argues that the video, was trying to please two separate audiences, creators who want to see the breadth of YouTube's output reflected back at them, and advertisers who need to be reassured that the platform is a safe place to spend money.
And that's true.
However, he goes on to point out a controversy that Roos brings up in the New York Times.
He says, In more general terms, there is a widespread perception that the platform is a hotbed for unsavory ideologies and groups, in particular the far right.
And obviously, advertisers are not too keen on having their ads placed next to extremist content.
Roos concludes, The Rewind controversy is indicative of a larger issue at YouTube, which is trying to promote itself as a bastion of cool, inclusive creativity while being accused of radicalizing a generation of young people by pushing them toward increasingly extreme content and allowing reactionary cranks and conspiracy theorists to dominate its platform.
Ledwich goes on to say, This is the report by Rebecca Lewis of the Data and Society Research Institute, one which Vox, Wired, and The Guardian have accepted wholeheartedly.
Lewis references a study that has been widely cited in the mainstream media as proof that
the platform provides a breeding ground for far-right radicalization.
This is the report by Rebecca Lewis of the Data and Society Research Institute, one which
Vox, Wired, and The Guardian have accepted wholeheartedly.
It contains a list of people from conservatives like Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro to white supremacists
like Richard Spencer, who form the Alternative Influence Network, a band of people supposedly
linked together through their reactionary views, defined as an opposition to visions
of social progress, or social justice and left-wing politics more generally.
By degrees, through this network, users are exposed to more extreme content than they would otherwise not encounter.
As Rebecca Lewis writes, it is highly interconnected and uses the same techniques that brands and other social media influencers use to build followers and garner traffic.
The report is written as if Lewis is investigating an underground crime network.
But it is essentially an account of her YouTube binge and activism aimed at pressuring YouTube to censor her political opponents.
In a section from the report, he quotes her as saying, Now here is the actual visualization of data collected by Mark Ledwich.
And before we dive into any specific channels to find the clusters of certain audiences, I want to point out a few things that he found that are particularly interesting.
First, the left is almost twice as large, or it is, more than double the size of the center and the right.
It's also larger than both of them combined.
What we can see here with these paths branching out from left to center and left to right are the amount of recommendations being given to various factions in political climate.
What we can see is that even though the right wing has only 2.2 billion recommendations, It is giving almost double the amount of recommendations that the left is giving to the right.
The same can be said of the center.
The center gives a massive portion of recommendations to left-wing sources, but the center only gives a tiny fraction of recommendations to right-wing content.
This would actually indicate that if there is a path to radicalization, it actually goes from right to left.
That if you are someone on the right or on the center, it is significantly more likely that YouTube will recommend left-wing content than it will recommend center or even right-wing content.
Now, for obvious reasons, the right is more likely to recommend its own videos, the center is more likely to recommend center videos, and the left is substantially more likely to recommend left-wing videos.
I had a chance to speak with Mark Ledwich, and I asked him several questions about the report and his findings.
In reference to the path to radicalization, this is what he said.
unidentified
The idea that people exposed to these, uh, basically ideas that are outside what's politically correct, Leads people to be radicalized.
It gets talked about a lot.
This has been the narrative for a long time.
And I haven't seen anything that shows that.
Like, I guess you can see if you explore the graphic, you click on a channel and you can see where the recommendations flow that YouTube suggests to people.
And it doesn't flow any particular direction.
It didn't seem like there's any consistent radicalization, at least in the recommendations going on.
And I haven't seen any evidence on the other side that people are being radicalized.
One of the most important realizations in the discussion I had with Mark was understanding what does left, center, or right actually mean.
Initially, when he produced this graphic, he had a fourth category called exclusively critical of the left, because there are some channels that would identify as left-wing individuals themselves, but are critical of intersectionality, and so he would group them into a separate category.
But ultimately ended up removing it because it didn't quite make sense to have a separate category based on an opposition to an ideology when policy was what defines left or right for the most part.
In taking a look at my channel, we can see that Tim Pool, which is the channel you're watching this video on, gets most of its recommendations from Timcast, which is my second opinion channel.
You can see that my channel is listed as center heterodox.
What's interesting here is that in almost all of my videos, I do defend the idea of true social justice and end to racism, how fascism is bad and things of this nature, and I'm typically critical of those who are authoritarian or regressive and seek to wield ideological power against people who don't have those same views.
Aside from that, I've also made several videos in defense of left-wing policy positions.
But it would be difficult to classify me as left in terms of political YouTube because of my opposition to left-wing identitarianism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm opposed to right-wing identitarianism as well, but I don't feel that they have any substantial power.
What was ultimately concluded by Mark was that if someone held left-wing political views but opposed left-wing identitarian ideology, he would list them as center heterodox.
And that actually brings up something really interesting.
It means that, to a certain extent, it is accepted, and most people would agree, that the mainstream left is at least somewhat in agreement with left-wing identitarianism ideology.
unidentified
Yeah, I think you've nailed up what the problem is.
There's, like, a typical category for left and right, which is based on economics and politics, and that's the kind of thing that you're looking at when you do a survey on, like, Political Compass or iSideWith.
Um, but I think on YouTube, there's a new, and I think, uh, there's a clear dividing line, which is based on attitudes towards social justice.
And, um, I think that's when you're analyzing YouTube, I think that's just as important.
So I kind of weighted those equally.
I'd look at, um, which side of both of those you're on and people that will.
Now I'm not in complete agreement with Mark in terms of his analysis, but I believe it's important to point out his view on how this comes together.
In his piece on Medium, he does point out that the right plus anti-social justice commentary type people sort of do something very similar to what the left does.
They choose the topic of the day and react to the most extreme members of the opposing faction.
Now personally, I understand this section called Right Plus Anti-Social Justice Commentary, which includes my channels, but I kind of disagree with this.
Because in this same bubble, you actually have left-wing channels.
In this section, you will find even some smaller left-wing channels.
Riley Dennis, for instance.
And you can even see that Feminist Frequency, which is a left-wing identitarian channel, is directly connected to many other channels, meaning they share an audience.
And the reason for this is that it's not so much a section of anti-social justice commentary as it is a conversation about left-wing identitarianism or the regressive left.
So you will find that there are some left-wing channels that are in the periphery of this, and many of them actually share an audience.
And going back to the narrative presented by Data & Society, another thing that we can sort of disprove is how they include Joe Rogan, for instance.
Joe Rogan is pretty much in the center of the map, and though he does connect to some channels that are associated with what they call the Alternative Influence Network, He's actually connected to many other mainstream channels as well, and left-wing channels like Secular Talk or the Jimmy Dore program.
We can see that people who watch Philip DeFranco are most likely going to be recommended Steven Crowder, followed by Joe Rogan and then CNN.
If we combine all of the left-wing channels, The amount of recommendations are much larger than any centrist or right-wing channel.
In fact, although Steven Crowder gets the bulk of his recommendations, CNN, Colbert, Seth Meyers, Last Week Tonight, and Big Joel receive more.
And this is plainly visible when you see the size of the left-wing mainstream channels.
Now, there's another interesting thing that gets pointed out in this kind of research.
It would be fair to say that Stephen Colbert is anti-Donald Trump and regularly makes commentary that opposes Donald Trump.
But there's a big difference between being at odds with Trump and being an identitarian.
One of the interesting things you find is that there are right-wing identitarian channels in the anti-social justice commentary section.
You also find people who oppose the alt-right in the same section.
Sargon of Akkad, for instance, was recently banned from Patreon because he was arguing with people he says are alt-right.
If Sargon of Akkad opposes identitarianism from the left or the right, why would he be so close to someone like James Alsup, who is considered to be a white nationalist?
And the reason, I believe, is that in this section, you have a lot of people who completely disagree with each other, and they often debate each other.
Now, in the Data & Society report, they talk about how this is still some kind of symbiotic relationship, when in actuality it's people debating identity politics and identitarianism.
The thing is, if Stephen Colbert or someone on the left goes up on television and espouses some type of left-wing identitarian policy or belief, it's going to anger the right-wing identitarians who are at odds with that group, and it's also going to anger those who oppose identitarianism as a whole.
Thus, you will likely find a shared audience, and I think it's more of an enemy-of-my-enemy type thing.
Not that any of these groups are aligned, but that both of these groups in different areas oppose a certain group.
And that's something we've heard Jordan Peterson say.
Many people have asked why someone on the alt-right might like Jordan Peterson.
Well, for the most part, they don't.
But they do support some of his rhetoric because he's critical of the collectivist and identitarian left.
And so are they.
And thus, they will watch him criticize that group, but will equally criticize him in return.
The main thing that I think we can take away is that, for one, the Dead Insider Report is absolutely incorrect.
We can see that the left gets most of the recommendations.
If there's any path to radicalization, it's from right and center to the left.
Well, we can also see that the left dominates the mainstream to a rather massive degree.
And thus, when you look at channels like Joe Rogan, you can see that he's not really part of any alternative influence network.
He's just a mainstream centrist.
But more importantly, there are some channels, Mike Cernovich for instance, Who is not connected to this alternative influence network at all.
In fact, if you watch Mike Cernovich videos on YouTube, you're more likely to watch Fox News or Sam Seder.
And Sam Seder is a left-wing channel.
And once again, it's kind of an even split.
Although Fox News gets the most, it's only a few thousand more than the majority report gets.
In fact, you can also see CNN, MSNBC, and Vice News are also receiving views from Mike Cernovich.
Now I did point out the left receives more recommendations, even though the center and the right are smaller.
But Mark makes an interesting observation.
He says YouTube recommendations are left-right neutral.
The diagram shows the number of views in 2018 for each political category, left, and the recommendations of a portion of those views, right.
Overall, recommendations are politically neutral, which is counter to the charge that the YouTube platform favors the reactionary right.
What we actually see on YouTube is that if someone like Feminist Frequency makes a video talking about intersectional feminism, And then someone who's a white nationalist makes a video about intersectional feminism.
You essentially have people who are interested in this concept watching both channels.
And thus, there are centrists, there are people on the left, and there are people on the right who occupy a certain space where there's a conversation happening about identitarianism as well as politics.
Mark also brings up that Ezra Klein and Rebecca Lewis of Data & Society believe that this is the reactionary right saying.
Many of these YouTubers are less defined by any single ideology than they are by a reactionary position.
A general opposition to feminism, social justice, or left-wing politics.
Mark says, I agree that this is the main dividing line between the various political tribes of YouTube.
There is very little discussion of taxation, environment, and other policy issues.
Mostly discussions revolve around the culture wars, with a fundamental split on the issue of social justice.
But I think the Data & Society report has created a definition for the reactionary right, for the purpose of problematizing them rather than as a useful label for understanding the political dynamics.
Anything outside of a narrow progressivism, anything that is deemed to conflict with the goals of social justice and left-wing politics, is the target.
Not only does this reject the idea that the left can also be opposed to these things, but their definition is so broad as to include a great swath of Americans.
One example he brings up is that a YouGov poll from 2016 shows that most Americans also align with the reactionary right on the issue of cultural appropriation.
This would mean not that these YouTubers or Americans are reactionary, but that the elements of the far left are trying to essentially smear those who disagree with their particular ideology.
There's a lot more to break down in this data, but I think it's fair to say that the Data Anxiety Report is a hit piece, it's a smear, it's an opinion, and it's actually wrong by many metrics.
But I will leave the link to this data in the description below, so those of you who are watching can click through this and see for yourself what it means and try and analyze this data.
For those that are interested, I'll have more videos on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNew, starting at 6pm.
There's a lot more to talk about that I couldn't get into, so please take a look at this data, and take a look at what Mark had to say in his Medium piece.
