The Internet – The Stepping Stone to White Supremacy

On Friday 15th March 2019, a gunman opened fire upon two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during a session of prayer. The massacre was live-streamed on Facebook, whose systems failed to alert the company to the video as YouTube similarly was unable to prevent multiples of the stream appearing on their own platform. Hundreds watched as the gunman took fifty victims, including children, in a heinous act of racially-motivated terrorism. Cited as a mass murder ‘of, and for, the internet’ by the New York Times, the perpetrator urged viewers to subscribe to Pewdiepie, a YouTube phenom, before committing the massacre he had earlier teased on Twitter and the online message board 8chan. A 74-page, white nationalist manifesto accompanied the shooters threats. An amalgamation of algorithmic nonsense and satirical mentions of obscure internet jokes such as Fortnite and Candace Owens, it was a nod to the dark 4chan subcultures of the ‘Extremely Online’ and a tool of twisted bait for the global media. The shooting was meticulously planned, the grotesque manifesto and livestream intended to inflame public outcry and entertain his sick comrades of the internet. While it is not the cause of an act of such terror, it is undeniable that the internet has begun to form a crucial role in the spread of Islamophobia, white nationalism and hatred.

The root cause of white supremacy is not the internet, it is racists. Previously swatted at as one would an irritating evolution of a fly for their performative Twitter provocations, such right-wing trolls have cultivated in their own corners of the internet. Bigoted ideologies consequently travel, connect and radicalise a lot faster than they otherwise would, especially when facets of alt-right beliefs become mainstream. While the utterance of Felix Kjellberg’s online-name ‘Pewdiepie’ by the Christchurch shooter may have merely been for the purpose of grossly reconfiguring an ongoing meme, there is an urgent need to address the position the YouTuber has been given within this hyper-online subculture of neo-nazism.

The internet in-joke of subscribing to Pewdiepie has been escalating in intensity throughout the last year. The YouTuber garnered $15 million in revenue in 2018 alone, but his top spot on the subscriber count list has recently been threatened by Bollywood corporate conglomerate, T-series. A social media campaign to retain Kjellberg’s place ensued, rapidly growing in both reach and in ludicracy. Originally beginning as a harmless hashtag, supporters last week spray-painted a Brooklyn Park WWI memorial and had previously hacked numerous printers and Google Homes across the US to spread the slogan. A statement allegedly used by the terrorist who attacked Christchurch ‘ironically’, many have cited its use as a means by which to pull a public figure into a politicised blame-game to detract attention from the larger issues of race. By reducing such a notable reference to a cleverly-concealed ‘meme’, we are giving too much credit to deranged domestic terrorists and we are missing what is right in front of us.

It is surreal and disturbing for such acts of violence to now be intertwined with relevant references to popular culture. It is stomach-turning to see the internet manifest itself as a dystopian stimulus for terrorism, and as a disgusting sleeping-ground in which the conditions for white supremacy are ripe – anonymity, connectivity and extremity. While in the past such crevices of the internet would have had to be deliberately sought for, the algorithms of sites such as YouTube are now pointing those susceptible in the right direction. Zeynep Tufeki of the New York Times recently noticed that, upon viewing a video of a Donald Trump rally, the platform began to recommend content which promoted a further step to the right – white nationalism. She found the same while even watching videos of the mundane – vegetarianism led to intense veganism, yoga led to to ultramarathoning. The autoplay algorithm favours extreme, attention-grabbing content as it keeps users watching and, as a result, keeps ad revenue flowing. These formulas mean that people no longer need to seek out this content, it instead finds them.

Evan Boland of Canada’s Anti-Hate Network has said that YouTuber Pewdiepie has, in the past, ‘flirted with, if not endorsed, the alt-right, neo-Nazi movement and anti-semitism’ – a remark which ignited indignation in the gaming channels’ supporters. They rolled their eyes at the mainstreams inability to take a joke, to understand that Kjellberg’s sometimes racist humour is ironic, that he accidentally said the n-word, that he mistakenly endorsed the white supremacist channel E;R in 2017, as ‘how can research every channel he recommends?’ However good the intentions of the social media star may be, the Wall Street Journal found that there is anti-Semitic and nazi imagery in nine of his videos. In one, two men hold up a sign that reads, ‘Death to All Jews.’ The excuse of it being ironic humour, no longer cuts it. When you harbour a platform of over 89 million subscribers and boast a former sponsor like Disney, you have the responsibility to at least ensure that you don’t use racial slurs or that you at the very least don’t endorse a channel that hosts unedited videos of Hitler speeches.

While the YouTuber is not a neo-nazi, or in anyway connected with the Christchurch massacre, it is vital to note that by using anti-Semitic or racist humour, alt-right and white nationalist sentiment is amplified and exposes a young audience to rhetoric they may not have otherwise heard. It can easily be logically seen as a stepping stone to radicalisation and normalisation of ‘Othering’ – especially where the YouTube algorithm is concerned. In the case of Pewdiepie, this is uncontestable. In January of 2017, Andre Anglin of the neo-nazi news site the Daily Stormer wrote a congratulations to the Swede, thanking him for ‘making the masses comfortable with our ideas.’

Racially motivated massacres will never make sense, especially if it is attempted by wading through the ‘Extremely Online’ manifesto of the Christchurch shooter. We must first look to the increased normalisation and the media sensationalisation of anti-Muslim and racist hate speech. We must look at the Daily Mail, the Sun, at Katie Hopkins, at Donald Trump, at media personalities like Stefan Molyneaux who capitalise off the incitement to hatred of marginalised and vulnerable groups. Ideas like those harboured by white supremacists are not found in a vacuum. The manifesto of the terrorist who killed 50 in Christchurch stated that the atrocity he committed was ‘to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands.’ The United States President, just two hours after sending his condolences to the victims and their families, described the immigrants crossing into the country across the Mexican border as an ‘invasion – people hate the word ‘invasion’ but that’s what it is.’ Last November the president echoed the same white nationalist trope. He said, ‘I don’t care what the fake media says. That’s an invasion of our country.’ When elected politicians are using the same rhetoric as white supremacists, when they are regarding neo-nazis as ‘good people’, when they are voting to close their borders to refugees, when they are villainsing people of colour as the problems of society, that is when we must stop trying to make sense of things. Racism will never make sense, terrorism will never make sense, white supremacy will most certainly never make sense – and they must never be normalised to the point that they do make sense. While people in positions of power make Islamophobic comments and speak in racial terms just short of slurs, then we must never lose sight of the fact this is not normal and we can never become desensitised to stories like Christchurch – we must unite and find strength and solidarity in the fact that hatred will never win.

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