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Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods (Published 2021) [nytimes.com]:

For over two years Caolan Robertson produced videos for a who’s who of the far right, but says he has since come to regret his role in the rise of online extremism.Credit...Alex Ingram for The New York Times

• Published April 15, 2021Updated June 23, 2023

Leer en español [nytimes.com]

• Published April 15, 2021Updated June 23, 2023

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In 2018, a far-right activist, Tommy Robinson [nytimes.com], posted a video to YouTube claiming he had been attacked by an African migrant in Rome.

The thumbnail image and eight-word title promoting the video indicated Mr. Robinson was assaulted by a Black man outside a train station. Then, in the video, Mr. Robinson punched the man in the jaw, dropping him to the ground.

The video was viewed more than 2.8 million times, and it prompted news stories [thesun.co.uk] across the right-wing tabloids in Britain [mirror.co.uk], where Mr. Robinson was rapidly gaining notoriety for his anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic views.

For Caolan Robertson — a filmmaker who worked for Mr. Robinson and helped create the video — it was an instructional moment. It showed the key ingredients needed to attract attention on YouTube and other social media services.

The video played into anti-immigrant sentiments in Britain and across Europe. It also focused squarely on conflict, cutting rapidly between shouts and shoves before showing Mr. Robinson’s punch. It also misrepresented what had actually happened.

In time, Mr. Robertson said, he realized that the videos he worked on stoked dangerous hatred. And in 2019, at a conference in Britain run by a left-wing newspaper, The Byline Times, Mr. Robertson distanced himself from his work with the far right. His change of heart was met with some skepticism.

“He was presented as a prodigal son,” said Louise Raw, an antifascist activist who was onstage for Mr. Robertson’s mea culpa. “But he has not been held to account.”

Now, Mr. Robertson is detailing the ways he and his collaborators searched for confrontations to gain popularity on YouTube.

Efforts to contact Mr. Robinson were unsuccessful, and Mr. Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Ms. Southern said she should not be described as a far-right activist, saying she is merely a conservative. She was not involved in “some horrible far-right grift that tried to deceive people into watching our content,” she added. “We were just doing what any other YouTuber does.”

Raw footage of the episode in Rome, provided by Mr. Robertson and reviewed by The New York Times, shows that the YouTube video was edited to give the false impression that Mr. Robinson was threatened. The full footage shows he was the aggressor.

He began watching videos from mainstream outlets, like an episode of the HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher” in which Sam Harris, an author and a podcast host, advocated greater criticism of Muslim beliefs [youtube.com]. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm suggested more-extreme videos involving personalities like Mr. Robinson, a former member of the neo-fascist and white nationalist British National Party who was born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

In 2017, Mr. Robertson contacted Mr. Robinson and soon began working with him as a video producer. By the end of the year, he was also collaborating with Ms. Southern, an activist from Canada.

Knowing what garnered the most attention on YouTube, Mr. Robertson said, he and Ms. Southern would devise public appearances meant to generate conflict. That December, they attended a women’s march in London and, with Ms. Southern playing the part of a television reporter, approached each woman with the same four-word question: “Women’s rights or Islam?”

They often received a confused, measured or polite response, according to Mr. Robertson. They continued to ask the question and sharpened it. Ms. Southern, for example, said it would be difficult for Muslim women to answer the question because their husbands wouldn’t let them attend the march. That caused anger to build in the crowd.

“It appears in the videos that we are just trying to figure out what is going on, gather information, understand people,” Mr. Robertson said. “But really, we were trying to find the most incendiary way of making them mad.”

ImageLauren Southern streaming a live video during a rally in Berkeley, Calif., in 2017.Credit...Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The thumbnail image for the YouTube video was indicative of a confrontation: a woman screaming as Ms. Southern walked away. As he often did, Mr. Robertson sharpened the video’s visual contrast — lightening the white colors and darkening the blacks — to subtly make the scene seem more dramatic.

Ms. Southern described the situation differently. “We asked the question because we knew it was going to force people to question their own political views and realize the contradiction in being a hard-core feminist but also supporting a religion that, quite frankly, has questionable practices around women,” she said. And, she added, they used video techniques that any media company would use.

The next year, Mr. Robertson and Ms. Southern traveled as far as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to create similar videos. Over the lifetime of Ms. Southern’s YouTube channel, according to channel statistics reviewed by The Times, her videos were viewed over 63 million times.

More than 71 percent of people who viewed these videos had not subscribed to her YouTube channel. In 2018, at the height of her popularity, at least 30 percent of the views occurred after the videos were automatically recommended to the viewer by YouTube’s algorithms.

Mr. Molyneux shied away from the kind of conflict that Ms. Southern embraced. He fashioned himself as an online philosopher. But the material Mr. Robertson edited slipped in “far-right ideas that appealed to the ethnonationalists — the extreme right-wing audience,” he said.

In 2018, the pair traveled to Poland for a video that painted the country as a place free of hardship and strife. The subtext was that it was because Poland is predominantly white. In an email to The Times, Mr. Molyneux said, “It was nice being in a country wherein I didn’t have to hire protective security.” He added that he felt the same way when he visited Hong Kong.

By early 2019, Mr. Robertson said, he grew disillusioned. There was a noticeable drop in traffic on Ms. Southern’s YouTube channel. Around the same time, YouTube began to remove more videos the company thought encouraged violence and spread misinformation.

After an Australian man killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — driven in part by anti-immigrant beliefs propagated by YouTube — Mr. Robertson realized, he said, that the videos he had made led to the same kind of violence in the Orlando nightclub in 2016.

“I felt like I had gone full circle that day,” he said.

Now, Mr. Robertson oversees Byline TV, a video offshoot of The Byline Times. He also runs a new organization, Future Freedom, which seeks to de-radicalize right-wing extremists. He is still counting YouTube views.

Mr. Robertson recently boasted in a text that in one day a video targeting Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist he once worked with, had been viewed over 250,000 times.

A correction was made onApril 16, 2021: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the group that the video producer Caolan Robertson runs. It is Future Freedom, not Future of Freedom.

How we handle corrections

is a technology reporter and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World.” He covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Feeding Hate With Video. Order Reprints [parsintl.com] | Today’s Paper [nytimes.com] | Subscribe [nytimes.com]

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