Under the Hood of the Right-Wing Media Machine
An interview with Becca Lewis – an academic and writer who specializes in online celebrity, political subcultures, and radicalization, among other things.
There’s been a wide front of interrogation into how online right-wing media spaces operate. This has ranged from efforts to understand how these spaces attract people, such as the New York Times podcast “Rabbit Hole,” to watchdog work through outlets like Media Matters that track misinformation and conspiracy – and the role right-wing media plays in proliferating both. There is some to be desired, however, regarding how to present meaningful alternatives to people – how to construct media and movements that can attract wide swaths of people, without exploiting their emotions or bringing out the worst instincts within them. Analyzing the right-wing media landscape with that specific lens in mind can hopefully be instructive in some way, to at least have some direction of what to do next, or what to keep trying.
To sharpen this lens a bit, I recently spoke by phone with Becca Lewis, a Stanford PhD candidate and research fellow at Data & Society and the University of North Carolina Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Lewis specializes in online celebrity, political subcultures, and radicalization, among other things. During our conversation – which has been slightly edited for clarity – we discussed what makes the right-wing media sphere tick, how it’s not just the infamous “algorithm” doing the work to absorb and radicalize people, and more.
I highly recommend you read this conversation with Becca Lewis in tandem with my previous story on right-wing media, from last week:
I recommend you read these together because both speak directly to each other; the above piece reads like a profile-in-action of the dynamics that the interview below confronts. So, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Becca Lewis.
What, in your eyes, are ways people can get lost into the right wing sphere, and what keeps them there? What sort of itch is the media scratching, or perhaps even creating, within people?
It can be a range of factors. A lot of times people are genuinely looking for answers to political questions they have, and they might search for something, and the people that have kind of been feeding answers into Google search results or YouTube or any number of sites are frequently people feeding faulty information. So sometimes it literally does come from people who are genuinely searching for answers to questions they have about the world. I think a preeminent case of that is the mass shooter Dylann Roof. He was curious about the Trayvon Martin case, and was reading on Wikipedia and got curious about, you know, what he calls “Black-on-White-crime.” So he enters the search term – that’s a white supremacist dog whistle – into Google, and the people using that term were hate groups. So the stuff that came back was just information from these hate groups, but he found it very convincing. And that kind of put him on his path of radicalization.
Sometimes though it’s different; it can be that people fall into these patterns almost accidentally, and maybe what they're actually interested in is just kind of finding community online. Or in some cases there may just be a content creator that they really like who starts telling them more and more political information than they have in the past. So, sometimes the goal is explicitly a knowledge and finding answers to political questions, and sometimes it's much more just about seeking advice about the world, camaraderie, community, that sort of stuff.
What do you think makes the right-wing sphere so distinct? What do you wish people understood more about it?
One of my biggest pet peeves in this space is, you know, we read a lot of people doing research on disinformation, and I think that among a lot of researchers – or people who want to help out in this space – there’s this assumption that as long as people are just confronted with the correct facts, we can kind of clear up all of the confusion that happens online. So then people kind of focus their efforts on fact-checking, and any number of similar debunking efforts, and while there’s certainly importance to that, I think it misses what's actually going on in these spaces, and a lot of what actually is happening is that people are losing trust in the various sources that we might think of as authoritative sources. So any fact-checking that comes from those sources is not going to be seen as credible by people who are kind of already disillusioned with the media. So you get all of these content creators and recruiters for the far-right essentially, who build trust in other ways – specifically different than how the mainstream media tries to build credibility. So instead of focusing on being an institution with a bunch of fact-checkers and a name-brand like the New York Times, they actually build trust by being the exact opposite of that by showing like, “listen, I'm not a fancy journalist. I'm just like you, and you can trust me, because I'm outside of those seats of power.” There's actually a form of trust-building that happens directly counter to what we might usually think of.
Could you talk about the social networking dynamic among the right-wing media landscape? How it seems that not only does it operate like a pipeline – taking viewers from one personality to the next – but also that, if you're watching this stuff, you get actively passed around between the personalities?
So one thing I have written about it is I think when we talk about online radicalization – particularly when we talk about YouTube – we focus too much on the algorithm, and that actually what's equally important is the social networking that happens both between creators, and audience members. For creators, what ends up happening is that everyone's incentivized to collaborate with each other. As content creators, that's kind of Content Creation 101. If you want to grow your channel, the way you do that is by collaborating with other YouTubers because then when you do, you get exposure to a new audience, or they come on your channel and they might bring their audience with them and give you a boost. So collaboration is really kind of a key part of the YouTube ecosystem. What happens then is that you get more mainstream YouTubers who end up collaborating with more extremist YouTubers, and they may be able to say “I don't endorse all of their views,” or “I was just interviewing them,” but really what it ends up being is a hangout session, where it just ends up amplifying the more extreme views. It creates the broader network of people who, even if they don't agree on all of the same things, at least have some shared premises that they all are starting from. Frequently we'll talk about having shared enemies – so they all dislike social justice warriors and Antifa, and critical race theory – all of these things that become common enemies for them.
So you have that and then at the same time you have network audiences who can network with each other, which is really important because that means fandoms of these celebrities become their own communities and identity markers, and they also frequently can engage directly with the content creators. When the content creators are live-streaming for example, people can take part in the chat. If the content creator has a Discord, people can take part in that. People can tweet at them. There's all these ways to actually interact directly with the content creators. So one thing I found is that not only are content creators pushing their audiences further to the right, but the reverse happens as well – that a lot of times their audiences who are already kind of far-right audiences start demanding more and more far-right content from the people they watch. As a content creator, you're looking to be successful. You're looking to give the audience what they want and if the audience is telling you that they want more and more far-right content, you have an incredibly big incentive to give that to them. So you end up having this kind of vicious cycle where audiences are pushing creators to the right, while creators are also pushing audience members to their right.
On one hand, the word “celebrity” is practically poison in the cultural conservative lexicon. But on the other hand, naturally there are functionally right-wing celebrities. So I’m curious if you've had any thoughts about the general mechanisms and relationships undergirding influencers and celebrity within the right-wing media landscape.
Yeah, absolutely. When we're analyzing the phenomena we don't talk about celebrity enough, because people feel like it's just kind of vapid or whatever. But actually the dynamics of celebrity are incredibly important, and I think no one illustrates that more than Donald Trump. That he was able to build a following for himself, because he already had the celebrity name recognition. As a celebrity, he also knew the intricacies of the media, and how to get attention, and how to build loyalty with fans, and all of these things that are part of celebrity culture that ended up being really valuable skills for him as he built up a political career for himself. And you have a lot of people doing that on a much smaller scale across the internet. When YouTube first started advertising itself, one thing they would talk about is how it was democratizing media. But actually what it's doing is kind of democratizing the ability for anyone to become kind of a mini-demagogue. There have been demagogues around in American societies since the development of mass media. So, if you look back in history, there's figures like the Catholic radio preacher Father Coughlin, who in the 30’s was broadcasting really reactionary ideas, got more and more openly anti-semitic over time, and had millions and millions of listeners. That I think is an early taste of what we're seeing now – it’s actually not all that different. It's just that the internet gives anyone the ability to be a mini Father Coughlin.
On the other side of things, what are your thoughts on the left-wing media sphere generally, and if it is capable to not just take on the right-wing media landscape but also perhaps proactively be there as an option before people fall into this landscape?
I think that it's been really interesting to watch the way that certain left-wing content creators have been able to engage with people in a way that either stopped them from getting radicalized, or pulled them back from radicalization. One of the most public examples of that is the young man who was featured in the long New York Times story – Caleb Cain – who got radicalized on YouTube, and then got pulled out of that radicalization by watching videos with Destiny, a liberal YouTuber (although his politics are kind of all over the place), and Contrapoints. He attributes both of them with pulling you out of this kind of far-right, white supremacist type of thinking.
But there are a lot of challenges in the left-wing media sphere, and the biggest one is that there is no left-wing equivalent of Fox News. I think it's hard to overstate the importance of Fox News in the right-wing media sphere – even now that everything is kind of digital. What you see is a really symbiotic relationship that has emerged between Fox News and online content creators. You have content creators whose entire goal is to be able to make it as a talking head on Tucker Carlson mainly, but Fox News generally. And then you have these Fox shows who are then finding topics from the internet, and amplifying those topics. So there’s the case, for example, when white supremacist Lauren Southern a couple of years ago was promoting this idea that there was a genocide happening against white farmers in South Africa, and eventually after it gained enough traction on YouTube, Tucker Carlson picked it up and did a segment on it.
The reason Fox News is so important is because just the amount of viewership they get is staggering, and that it has institutional power in a way that individuals on YouTube don't necessarily – but it also is able to present itself as alternative: it's ‘not the same as the mainstream news.’ The left-wing media sphere doesn't have that because traditionally it has been the right-wing that has opted out of mainstream news saying ‘you can't trust places like the New York Times, and that's why we need a Fox News.’ You certainly have people on the left-wing that are more and more opting out of sources coming from mainstream liberal institutional sources, but none of them have created anything nearly as big as Fox News.
How do you think, then, the dialogues about right-wing media landscapes versus left-wing media landscapes is framed in mainstream discourse? Because when you describe the rise and success of Fox News, some might say “oh well what about CNN and MSNBC? Aren't those the left-wing analogues to Fox News?”
First of all, MSNBC has never gotten close to Fox’s viewership numbers. And also there's an asymmetry between how left MSNBC is, versus how far right Fox is: Fox is further to the right than MSNBC is to the left. I don't think it could meaningfully be treated as a left-wing version. CNN even less so, despite the fact that it has become this unifying cause for right-wing activists claiming that CNN is left-wing. It really isn't, and never has had an intention of being left-wing. It very much at this point is trying to stay right down the middle I would say, and I think a lot of times that reads to the right-wing as being liberal, but there's no real equivalent to Fox News there either.
There's a really interesting study that was done by some professors at Harvard who did a network analysis looking at the media sphere online and what different people are sharing and engaging with. They found that it's really asymmetric. You have people who identify as Democrats, or left-wing, sharing sources that if you look at the views that these sources are espousing – it’s a mix, or like mildly to the left. If you look at something like the New York Times – despite accusations of liberal bias – their opinion pages have a great deal of conservative columnists who have specifically been hired to provide that point of view. Whereas on the right-wing – this was done a few years ago, so it was a little bit different media landscape – but the two big sources that were being shared in reference were Fox News and Breitbart. Breitbart, at the time, was calling itself the voice of the alt-right. You're not going to find any left-wing perspective or point of view on the pages of Breitbart, and in fact you frequently will see allusions to white supremacist dog whistles, and so on. So, again, it's just deeply asymmetric there.
Imbued within all this is the very basic question of actually changing someone's mind. The kind of political convincing that doesn't just shift someone's political identifications – whether they're Republican or Democrat – but the way they look at the world. How do you conceive of that kind of genuine mind changing? Have you actually seen how it can work?
Yes, a little bit, although I would say it's something I think we still need way more research on, and it's something that we're just starting to understand (except other than the fact that there have been efforts to draw people out of white supremacist organizations for decades now). But with the internet, it makes it a little bit different and I think we're grappling with what it means, for example, to engage with someone who has bought into QAnon, and that there's some different elements at work than someone who in the 80’s joined up with the skinheads – although some of the same things still apply. But I think, first of all, the big thing is that you have to come at it with a sense of understanding. It can't come from a dismissive or scornful perspective, because all that does is make people be more rigidly locked onto their ideas. It kind of creates this backlash effect where people can become more invested in promoting whatever they believe – they get defensive about it. It really has to come from a place of respect, from love, and it also has to happen over time. It’s not going to happen in one sitting. That's another reason actually why sometimes other content creators can be great forms of de-radicalization – because someone can sit with their videos over time. Maybe they'll start with one video and be somewhat skeptical, and then keep watching some videos and eventually start to come around to their worldview. It works gradually in the same way that radicalization works gradually. So I think people have to treat it as something that happens over time. It needs to happen from a place of caring respect, and it can't just happen through fact-checking, or you know treating people as having crazy delusions that they just need to wake up from.
It was helpful to hear directly from Lewis, and to explore some of her work including her analysis of how online “micro-celebrities” participate in reactionary politics, and her explication of how online political influencers network and strategize with each other in order to propagate far-right ideology through varnished appeals of authenticity and alternative credibility.
Much of Lewis’ points jibed with ideas expressed by the people I spoke with for last week’s deep-dive story on how someone can get lost in – and leave – the right-wing media ecosystem. Many things she said specifically reminded me of different elements impacting Kate Shepherd, one of the main subjects of the story – who went from initially being superficially invested with politics, to attending Ben Shapiro events and dating Steven Crowder’s producer, to now self-identifying as a leftist.
Lewis’ point on how unintentional these processes can be – that people can just be innocuously searching for answers to reasonable inquiries before being lured into a completely different part of the internet – was something Jared Holt, host of technology & politics podcast SH!TPOST and Research Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, reflected on as well, citing the pandemic as a ready example of this:
“You can stumble upon these things by looking for stuff you might not think is totally related. The pandemic is a really great example of this. It’s completely feasible to imagine somebody getting on their computer typing in, something like ‘what's the truth about the Corona vaccine?’ and that SEO happens to pull up weird right-wing content. They view it, the site says ‘oh wow they like it. They read this article for three minutes. That must have been a really engaging piece of content, let's see if we could show them something like that again, and see how they react to it then.’”
The desire to find a community of like-minded people, a safe space that shares some little-known knowledge, is something Mike Rains, co-host of Adventures in HellwQrld and co-moderator of the subreddit QAnonCasualties, was intimately familiar with:
“There’s the quest for information, a truth that other people don't know. That's catnip for so many people, and it just leads them to believe once you find one hidden truth that you believe in, you’ll find more. You're also now in the social aspect of it. You're looking for a group of people that will believe what you believe. Now you're getting validation, you're getting acceptance. It's just this massive way to get into a community that's constantly telling you that you're right, and that you're smart, and that you know better than everybody else, that you're part of the secret in-group.”
Matt Binder, journalist and commentator for popular talk show Majority Report, had observations that resonated with Lewis’ work on the network-effect of right-wing online media:
“The right is a well-oiled machine, to the point – whether it's organically, or because there's some money exchanging hands through some sort-of advertisement or content sharing deals, whatever – the end result is the right-wing media sphere always promotes others in the sphere.”
Holt noted, like Lewis, that there isn’t always necessarily a formal operation as much as there is content creators casually working together to strategically build their audiences – that sometimes “there's no board meetings happening, there's just a Twitter DM with like 40 accounts in it.”
And Lewis’ points on the asymmetrical nature between the right-wing and left-wing media sphere paired with Holt once more, who noted that right-wing influencers often see themselves as playing for some sort-of broader anti-establishment team, and consequently are less likely to engage in substantive political disputes; that often rifts are personally-driven, rather than motivated by ideology. As I wrote, this contrasts with a left that constantly undergoes debates of strategy, tactics, and baseline policy objectives; different factions debate whose ideology can build a bigger tent in the face of a power structure that favors right-wing politics electorally, and materially – given entrenched, status quo politics is exactly what Republicans want.
Cody Johnston, co-host of popular YouTube channel SomeMoreNews, noted the financial elements behind this asymmetry, too, quipping that, unlike the range of bloated donors funding many right-wing outlets “you’d be hard-pressed to find a billionaire willing to fund any left-wing media, because the projects are in opposition to each other. No, you’d fund media that more or less says ‘everything is fine, the system works perfectly, racism doesn’t exist, don’t rock the boat, you too can be a billionaire and one day you will be.’”
Nearly everyone I spoke to, including and especially Kate Shepherd echoed Lewis’ point that practices like fact-checking can not be the only means of taking on the right-wing media sphere.
Yes, though, it is still incumbent to confront and address lies or bad-faith arguments members of the right-wing media sphere might propagate. But additionally, there’s a task to actively present an alternative community and movement that’s bound by sincerity and love, rather than suspicion and outrage. As Cody Johnston said to me, “it’s not enough to point out that these people are wrong, but you have to offer an alternative. A better world is possible and you (everyone, actually!) can be a part of it.”
The task, then, is ours.
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