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This report identifies and names the Alternative Influence Network (AIN): 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. Content creators in the AIN claim to provide an alternative media source for news and political commentary. They function as political influencers who adopt the techniques of brand influencers to build audiences and “sell” them on far-right ideology.
The ideological loops between influencers and audiences can also take place within the course of a single video. Many of the YouTubers in the AIN make use of YouTube live stream, broadcasting to their followers in real time (users can later archive these videos so they remain accessible). In these cases, viewers can comment on influencer’s videos in real time, and the influencers often respond within the video. YouTube monetized these interactions with the introduction of Super Chat in 2017. Super Chat is a feature that allows users to pay money to have their comments highlighted and pinned on a comment stream.112 Super Chat is a particularly appealing feature for content creators because it is another way to monetize their content, even if their videos overall have been demonetized by the platform. A recent article in Buzzfeed News counted the Super Chat intake from two far-right videos, finding they each brought in $4,000 (of which YouTube takes a cut).113 In these contexts, viewers often purposefully make shocking or offensive comments in an attempt to get the influencers to read them on screen (Fig. 13). In one particularly disturbing video from March 15, 2018, political influencers Andy Warski and Baked Alaska, along with live streamer Asian Andy, filmed themselves wandering around Los Angeles for five hours.114 They called the event the “IRL Bloodsports” (“IRL” refers to “in real life”), and they set up a speaker with an automated voice that read Super Chat comments as text-to-speech. Within minutes, offensive comments were automatically being read out loud in front of their Uber driver. In many cases, these comments were specifically crafted to avoid any keyword filters or censorship attempts set up ahead of time from the live streamers or from YouTube. See, for example, the following comment which was read in full during the video: “Hey Baked, remember that time
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Political influencers often fundamentally understand this. While they posture as being underground and facing censorship from YouTube, they also know they are being given a major platform from which to broadcast their views. On May 23, 2018, Paul Joseph Watson tweeted a photo of himself holding up a plaque YouTube sent to him for surpassing one million subscribers (Fig. 14). He added a caption, “YouTube secretly loves me.”
