Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Deplatformed Extremists -- Including Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and Anti-Semites -- Thriving in Shadowy Corners of the Internet to Avoid Censorship
March 12, 2021
White supremacists and other extremists are moving to the dark corners of the Internet, making them more difficult to monitor (anokarina)
By Bill Berkowitz
Is deplatforming white nationalists, neo-Nazis, right-wing militia groups, and other anti-Semitic and anti-black extremists from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other popular social media sites, chasing these groups and individuals underground? “Where In The World Are White Supremacists Going to Turn Up” next? While the deplatforming story may not be as culturally quenching as Oprah’s Prince Harry/Meghan Markle interview, the Seuss estate’s decision not to publish six of his books that contain egregious racial and ethnic stereotypes, or Hasbro’s decision to introduce a gender-neutral Potato Head, it is more consequential than any of those momentary culture-grabbing tales. Right-wing terrorists with an agenda that includes committing acts of violence are repositioning: finding new platforms where they can organize, market and monetize, in the wake of the January 6th Capitol insurrection.
As New York magazine’s Jesse Singal wrote in mid-January, the post January 6 come-to-Jesus moment some mainstream social media sites are going through “is part of a larger story line, which is that online radicalism has been fueled by lax content-moderation policies on the part of the major platforms where hundreds of millions or billions of people communicate.”
The removal of right-wing extremists from mainstream sites provides an opening for more niche sites. As Gregory Davis pointed out at hopenothate.org/uk, many of the militia right’s key influencers are moving “from their homes on mainstream platforms” and seeking “out new spaces on unmoderated ‘alt-tech’ platforms such as the messaging app Telegram, the Twitter clone Gab, and the video hosting site BitChute.”
“Public scrutiny drives alt-right personalities deeper into the bowels of the internet, reducing their visibility,” CNN’s Rob Kuznia, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Sara Sidner and Mallory Simon, reported in mid-February. Having been chased from such sites as PayPal, and GoFundMe, they are urging followers to donate through the dispersing of cryptocurrency.
"I have seen firsthand the degree to which figures who were...extremely successful in radicalizing large numbers of people, become extraordinarily marginalized, extraordinarily fast in so-called dark corners of the internet," Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told CNN.
Several key figures, including Robert Warren Ray, who was indicted in June 2018 for using tear gas on counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, is nowhere to be found, although he is still able to be “a prolific podcaster under a Bigfoot-themed avatar and the name ‘Azzmador,’” and to become, for awhile, a top 20 earner on a platform called DLive. CNN noted.
Another of the disappeared is the much better known neo-Nazi, Andrew Anglin. According to CNN, “Anglin, publisher of The Daily Stormer, one of the web's most notorious hate sites … was dumped by Google and GoDaddy after Anglin in a post mocked the protester who was killed in Charlottesville as a ‘fat, childless 32-year-old slut.’"
CNN reported that “Like Ray, Anglin is on the lam …. [having] evaded attorneys since the summer of 2019, when he lost a spate of lawsuits. In the biggest judgment against him, Anglin was ordered by a judge to pay $14 million to a Jewish woman in Montana who had endured anti-Semitic harassment and death threats from Anglin's "troll army" of supporters.” The woman, Tanya Gersh, has yet to receive a dime of the judgment.
DLive is owned by a 30-year-old Chinese national named Justin Sun, who takes a 20% cut of its streamers' revenue, according to its website.
Anthime "Tim" Gionet, known as "Baked Alaska," used DLive to live-stream his role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. “Gionet was suspended from the site, as was Nick Fuentes -- part of a White nationalist group of young radicals called the Groypers -- who was also at the January 6 rally, though he says he did not enter the Capitol,” CNN reported.
"DLive was appalled that a number of rioters in the U.S. Capitol attack abused the platform to live stream their actions," and when its moderators become aware of the live streams, they shut them down, the company said in a statement to CNN. "All payments to those involved in the attack have been frozen."
Fuentes, whose group recently hosted a white supremacist meeting at the same time CPAC was holding their annual conference, is DLive’s top earner, and took in $114,000 in six months in January. In addition, according to CNN, “Fuentes received a single donation of 13.5 bitcoin, at the time worth about $250,000, in December from a person whom researchers believe was a computer programmer in France who apparently killed himself shortly afterward.”
White nationalist dead-enders see themselves as true Trumpsters, or in some cases, more radical than Trump. The New York Times’ Sheera Frankel told Michael Barbara, host of the newspaper’s podcast “The Daily,” that after being deplatformed, these groups “start to splinter off into the farthest corners of the web,” finding new platforms where they have no fear about saying whatever they want. How deep does online radicalization run? Stay tuned and we will find out together!
Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter
Continue the conversation at the BuzzFlash Nation group on Facebook