The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher;

Author:Max Fisher; [FISHER, MAX]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316703314
Publisher: Hachette
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

2. Unite the Right

JONAS KAISER PEERED down his first YouTube rabbit hole on a break between research sessions for a PhD that, at first, had little to do with American social media. He was studying climate-change skepticism in his native Germany, which was considered something of a mystery. Unlike in the U.S., Germany had no prominent political party or figure that was skeptical of climate change, so the existence of the doubters perplexed him. “It just seemed like this very odd community,” he said. “I was interested in, like, how? Why?”

Graduate-student life can be grueling. Kaiser, who is lanky and baldheaded, resembling a pipe cleaner in glasses and V-necks, liked to relax with YouTube clips of competitive video gaming. Growing up in a remote village, he’d stayed connected with friends through online gaming, but his laptop at grad school wasn’t equipped for it, so he did this instead. One day, he recalled, “Gamergate was everywhere,” saturating YouTube’s gaming channels. Until then he had never heard of Breitbart or Milo Yiannopoulos, he said. The platform began nudging him into other communities that had also picked up the cause of Gamergate: pro-atheism YouTubers, science YouTubers, alt-right YouTubers. “I distinctly noticed a shift, suddenly new communities forming their identity around that,” he said, “around misogyny and misinformation.” By routing users into and between these factions, the algorithm seemed to be binding them all together.

It was an aha moment for Kaiser, who saw a parallel with the German climate-change deniers. “It’s all very small and it’s splintered,” he said of his country’s climate-skeptic movement. “Really the only place where they could exchange their thoughts and coalesce and find allies was online.” These groups didn’t reflect real-world communities of any significant size, he realized. They were native to the web—and, as a result, shaped by the digital spaces that had nurtured them. Climate skeptics largely gathered in the comments sections of newspapers and blogs. There, disparate contrarians and conspiracists, people with no shared background beyond a desire to register their objection to climate coverage got clumped together. It created a sense of common purpose. And the placement of newspaper comments—right beneath the article—made them unusually visible, giving everyday news readers a false impression of their own popularity, bringing waves of recruits.

Could YouTube be doing something similar? Kaiser wondered. One of the networks that the platform had stitched into Gamergate was the alt right. The far right had been around for decades, he knew. But online it now seemed intertwined with social media circles that had little to do with politics, merging into something larger, something new. After finishing his PhD, Kaiser linked up with Adrian Rauchfleisch, a Swiss graduate student with similar interests and a flair for programming, who would become his longtime research partner. The pair repurposed the tools Kaiser had developed for tracking climate-change skepticism, now to understand Germany’s ascendant far right.

But they suspected that any lessons would apply to the United States, too. It was summer 2016, with Donald Trump rising in polls.

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