By Harald Sick and Maik Fielitz
Tweets, blog posts, stories, reels, snaps, TikToks, short messages and live streams: there is a multitude of (self-)presentation types and, in principle, no restriction on which digital media formats extremist actors use. In times when the (counter) public is fragmented across many platforms, those who want to reach the masses must play on every stage. A considerable effort for propaganda is therefore invested into cross-media strategies. This creates a digital ecosystem in extremist milieus, which unfold through cross-platform and cross-media links.
In the German far-right extremist scene, Telegram is the go-to place to get updates on news from the far-right fringe and for mobilising and organising anti-government protests. However, the platform’s affordances are impractical for long-term interaction and its reach is negligible compared to mainstream platforms. Hence, it is often used to navigate followers to other platforms where they can address broader masses. However, these actors are not welcome on all platforms. As a result, some mainstream platforms have introduced moderation policies such as shadow bans or even de-platforming efforts – making cross-platform linking even more important for extremist actors to circumvent these barriers.
To delve into the cross-media dynamics, we analysed all outgoing links to a set of ten social media platforms. We discovered more than 776,000 links from Telegram to YouTube between August 2021 and June 2024 which makes YouTube the number one destination and by far the most popular platform among the nearly 2,000 German Telegram channels analysed from far-right and conspiracist milieus in Germany. In our study Subscribe to Subversion we analysed their community building efforts, both cross-platform and on YouTube itself, what video formats they use to reach their audience, and finally, were able to glimpse at YouTube’s moderation efforts by assessing which linked videos have been removed over time. This blog shares the key insights.
YouTube: The digital stage of the far right
For many years, YouTube has been a central hub for far-right extremists to spread their content from the political fringes to the centre. This is characterised by the adaptation of different video formats, a professionalisation of content creation and the production of influencer-like content. However, to understand why far-right channels are so prominent on YouTube, it is important to consider: The platform creates its utility not alone by itself. Together with Telegram, for example, it forms a symbiosis: While YouTube hosts the videos on its servers and makes them available to a mass audience without access restrictions, Telegram is functional for quick linking, which also reaches into private chat groups and whets the appetite for the videos.
In addition, far-right alternative actors have already established a well-functioning network on Telegram, where they share and forward their content with high frequency. Of the 2,000 actors in our Telegram monitoring, around 470 have parallel YouTube accounts. We then conducted a detailed analysis of these channels and the transcripts of their YouTube videos—a total of 77,770. Altogether, these clips amassed approximately 2.3 billion views on YouTube.
This allowed us to identify a self-constructed and self-sustaining recommendation engine, built through the close collaboration of the studied actors from the far-right and conspiracist milieus, which is responsible for their immense outreach. Their video activism, combined with mutual cooperation, enables actors to target users and actively direct them to the content of like-minded actors.
Figure 1: Links from Telegram to other platforms over time in relation to frequency of messages
Many of the linked videos in our dataset go beyond traditional video activism and are adapted to YouTube’s platform culture, which is also reflected in the fact that many producers see themselves as ‘Youtubers’. They are creating formats that are increasingly self-expressive, or more interactive and likely to be commented on by viewers, as well as live formats that allow them to participate in certain social situations.
In addition to alternative news formats, documentaries and streams, classic influencer formats that convey an intimate mood are popular, as are candid lifestyle formats that focus on cultural trends or hobbies. They are important to establish (para-social) interactions with their audience.
How YouTube influencers reinforce each other
In 2018, the media researcher Becca Lewis conducted qualitative research on what she calls the Alternative Influence Network: ‘an alternative media system that uses the techniques of brand influencers to build an audience and ‘sell’ a political ideology to them’. What her research, as well as other studies based on the dataset from her work, show is the close interaction of a class of political influencers.
According to Lewis, they are increasingly developing a discourse power beyond political parties and organisations. Particularly within a milieu, such influencers collaborate intensively. Similar to the citation cartels of some academics, they form self-referential invitation cartels that reinforce each other. The invitation practices of influencers therefore tell us a lot about the relationships within and between milieus.
To learn more about such collaborative networks between far-right actors on YouTube, we identified who appeared with whom in the recorded videos. We used a large language model (LLM) to analyse the 77,770 videos for such collaborations. As the model was not trained on the data relevant to us, we built a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system and optimised it using the descriptions of the 74,000 YouTube channels that were linked to around a million times by the recorded Telegram channels. This allowed the RAG system to analyse the titles and descriptions of the videos produced by the identified parallel channels on YouTube.
We specifically examined: (1) whether there is a podcast or interview situation in which the channel host is actively involved; (2) who are the protagonists or guests in these videos; (3) whether the participants in the format have their own YouTube channel.
Figure 2: Alternative influencer network with guests
It is noteworthy that of the 470 actors analysed, 231 collaborate in the form of joint interviews or pod/vodcast formats: a remarkable cartel of invitations and a well-connected network. The spectrum analysed thus makes intensive use of the opportunities for community building on YouTube. At least as remarkable is the prominence of politicians from the far-right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) who are invited as guests and use the opportunity to bring their content closer to the far-right audience of the channels analysed. The representatives like to point out that these are only invitations to talk. Appearing in (video) podcasts does not necessarily mean political agreement; they simply accept offers of dialogue from all sides.
This bridge-building also promotes ideological immersion on the consumer side. This is because the joint interviews and video podcast formats allow interested parties to access videos with different ideological colours via a few nodes and many different paths. For example, a person who is actually interested in esotericism can quickly end up in the area of conspiracism via self-proclaimed life coaches. It takes two clicks then to arrive at the hard core of the far right, like the Compact Magazine and AfD channels.
This self-built and self-sustaining network enables the actors to build a community that is not much affected by shadow banning, since it creates at least partially its own visibility. This should not be underestimated, especially in combination with the many out-links from platforms such as Telegram, X or WhatsApp, where they have already expanded their networks.
YouTube as an open space for far-right networks
For extremist actors, digital platforms are only as popular as they are as long as they allow them to achieve the desired reach. Recommendation algorithms are not the decisive factor here, as we have already seen with the (cross-platform) collaboration network identified. The fact that the networks have been able to expand so well and that the videos have found such a large audience is due to YouTube’s moderation policy, which has been significantly reduced since the end of the pandemic.
We were able to track this development by using online data: While 4432 YouTube videos from our dataset were removed in 2021 for violating community guidelines, the same actors saw only 779 removals in 2023. This decline cannot be explained by the end of the pandemic alone. This is because the coronavirus disinformation was seamlessly followed by a flood of other far-right conspiracy and victimhood myths, which YouTube apparently does not consider critical.
The deletion rate could also have fallen because alternative far-right actors communicate more cautiously. However, there is evidence that platforms are trying to avoid accusations of censoring certain content so as not to alienate any user groups. The trend is not to delete users, but to reduce their reach through various measures – a measure commonly known as shadow-banning.
YouTube doesn’t seem to want to ban too many actors from the platform. One reason could be: They create content that attracts a lot of interaction. Another one: It could be about avoiding negative publicity; after all, the debate about censorship is a heated one. Softer measures are thus probably the preferred method, especially since they can, at least, appease civil society actors engaged against the far right.
However, such measures are ineffective, when, as we have shown, well-functioning networks manage swarms of users in the background. YouTube has clearly not yet understood the role it plays in alternative influence networks.
This article is an abridged version of the topic focus from Machine Against the Rage, no. 6 (Summer 2024). The original study was conducted and co-authored with Christian Donner, Michael Schmidt, Lena-Maria Böswald, Wyn Brodersen and Holger Marcks.
Maik Fielitz is heading the research unit of the Federal Association for Countering Online Hate based in Berlin, Germany, and is head of research on democracy and right-wing extremism at the Jena Institute for Democracy and Civil Society: http://bag-gegen-hass.de/
Harald Sick is a political scientist. He works as a researcher for the Federal Association for Countering Online Hate and is affiliated with the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he conducts research on the influence of lobby interests on EU legislative processes. His research focuses on network analysis and network statistics and examines the dynamics of anti-democratic discourse in social networks.
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