A free market in extreme speech: Scientific racism and bloodsports on YouTube

Around 2018, YouTube became heavily criticized for its radicalizing function by allowing far-right actors to produce hateful videos that were in turn amplified through algorithmic recommendations. Against this ‘algorithmic radicalization’ hypothesis, Munger and Phillips (2019, A supply and demand framework for YouTube politics. Preprint. https://osf.io/73jys/download; Munger and Phillips, 2020, Right-wing YouTube: a supply and demand perspective. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 21(2). doi: 10.1177/1940161220964767.)) argued that far-right radical content on YouTube fed into audience demand, suggesting researchers adopt a ‘supply and demand’ framework. Navigating this debate, our article deploys novel methods for examining radicalization in the language of far-right pundits and their audiences within YouTube’s so-called ‘Alternative Influence Network’ (Lewis, 2018, Alternative Influence. Data & Society Research Institute. https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/ (accessed 9 December 2020).). To that end, we operationalize the concept ‘extreme speech’—developed to account for ‘the inherent ambiguity of speech contexts’ online (Pohjonen and Udupa, 2017, Extreme speech online: an anthropological critique of hate speech debates. International Journal of Communication, 11: 1173–91)—to an analysis of a right-wing ‘Bloodsports’ debate subculture that thrived on the platform at the time. Highlighting the topic of ‘race realism’, we develop a novel mixed-methods approach: repurposing the far-right website Metapedia as a corpus to detect unique terms related to the issue. We use this corpus to analyze the transcripts and comments from an archive of 950 right-wing channels, collected from 2008 until 2018. In line with Munger and Phillips’ framework, our empirical study identifies a market for extreme speech on the platform, which came into public view in 2017.