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ABSTRACT
In recent years, popular interest in disinformation has coalesced around a series of high-profile events, starting with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. While Facebook and Twitter drew the most scrutiny in the immediate aftermath of these events, attention has turned in recent years to YouTube as a source of right-wing disinformation and radicalization. While the bulk of the extant literature on this topic has focused on the supply of right-wing content on YouTube – including quantitative studies examining the impact of the recommendation algorithm and qualitative studies exploring the rhetoric and micro-celebrity practices of reactionary channels – few studies have examined what draws viewers to the videos they watch. This paper aims to fill this gap in research by analyzing interviews with 18 current and former fans of US-centric reactionary YouTube channels. Based on these interviews, I introduce the concept of bootstraps epistemology as a way of understanding right-wing approaches to accessing political truth and knowledge.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Dr. Jessie Daniels, Dr. Kathryn Eccles, Dr. Josh Cowls, the reviewers, and journal editors for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. A condensed, 5-page version of this article was published online by University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). The short article (Ma, Citation2023) was included in the conference proceedings collection for the International Communication Association’s pre-conference event “What comes after disinformation studies?” which took place in May 2022.
2. Although objectivity has been widely accepted as a journalistic ideal in US newsrooms since the mid-20th century, scholars have long noted that the work of reporting inevitably involves interpretation and moral evaluation on the part of journalists (Callison & Young, Citation2019; Tuchman, Citation1972).
3. Although search engine users often think of these websites as objective reservoirs of information (Toff & Nielsen, Citation2018; Tripodi, Citation2018), scholars have shown that their results are far from neutral and shaped by the purchase of advertisements, racial and gender bias (Noble, 2018), and search engine optimization strategies (Tripodi, Citation2022).
4. Ethics approval for this study was granted by the Oxford Internet Institute’s Departmental Research Ethics Committee in July 2019 (approval reference number SSH_OII_CIA_19_060).
5. Data from Tubular was retrieved by Meaghan Conroy, a researcher of right-wing extremism with whom I collaborated on a project in late 2021 and early 2022.
6. Names of respondents have been altered to protect their confidentiality.
7. Gamergate was a 2014 controversy, ostensibly about ethics in gaming journalism, that was driven by anti-feminist sentiment and backlash against the supposed encroachment of “social justice warriors” into gamer subculture. Gamergate saw one of the first instances of networked harassment, with female developers and games journalists being targeted (Massanari, Citation2017).
8. Here, I borrow language from Ferreira da Silva’s (Citation2007) book Toward a global idea of race, in which she argues that racial logics are inextricable from early modern Western philosophy. This worldview elevated the white European subject as transparent – possessing agency, interiority, and reason – while Europe’s various “others” were cast as affectable—subject to the forces of nature.
9. These fields are certainly informed by their own imagined epistemologies, which STS and journalism scholars have analyzed over the years (egs. Ekström & Westlund, Citation2020; Reed, Citation2010). This paper does not seek to rank these approaches against one another but rather to show how reactionary influencers adopt certain signifiers of scientific and journalistic rigor while obfuscating the collective norms and standards that regulate these fields in practice.
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Cindy Ma
Cindy Ma (D.Phil Oxford Internet Institute) is a Lecturer in Race and Media at the University of Leeds. Her research examines the interactions between online ecosystems, political discourse, and racial inequity.