So About that "Youtube Alt-Right Pipeline"...

[Battlegrinder]

A very small number of people actually do used to in more numbers previously, but I've never heard anyone call themself Alt-lite. Even then calling them what they actually call themselves would be useful.

If you say so. The only people I've ever seen identify as such are either Spensner and the rest of the "no, I'm totally not a white supremacist, I'm.....this other thing that you've never heard of before" crowd, and trolls self-identifing as such in order to piss of leftists. IE, the "However,they all enjoy antagonizing and upsetting (\triggering") liberals and leftists, and use racist and otherwise oensive humor as a means to transgress what they describe as authoritarian boundaries set by the left-of-center." bunch the study was discussing, which it labeled alt-lite.

It's a shibboleth. It doesn't actually mean anything beyond "Well this person claims they're not a Nazi, but they're darned close..."

You could say that about Alt-Right as a label as well. No one sane actually identifies with it, and it's lost any meaning beyond a thinly veiled smear.

That's not quite what a shibboleth is. Shibboleth's are something that is used by people to signal affiliation or membership in a group, not to categorize other people in a group. For a modern example, responding to news or the words of others with just "yikes" is a thing that SJWs tend to do, or the right wing equivalent of summarizing anything from CNN as "orange man bad".

 

[StormEagle]

Personally I dont get why Alt-lite is a thing. It isn't an actual ideology anyone subscribes to.

It’s just another way for leftists to call people evil nazi scum without actually calling them evil nazi scum.

 

[Terthna]

Of course Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson don't push people towards the far right. Those guys aren't really even that conservative, I'd say they are moderates more than conservatives. People should find themselves some real conservative YouTube channels to watch

Calling these guys, among numerous others, gateways to the far right is just the standard left wing tactic of calling anybody to the right of Saul Alinsky a Nazi. Honestly, even the so called "far right" or "alt-right" don't typically have extreme views. The world has just gone so crazy left that a position that should just be basic sanity, like controlling a nation's borders, gets called fascism.

At this point, I don't think it's a tactic. There was an article written back in 2012, wherein Jonathan Haidt describes the results of a test he conducted, to see what liberals and conservatives think of each other:

I conducted a test to see how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. I asked more than 2,000 Americans to fill out a questionnaire. One third of the time they were asked to fill it out by answering as themselves. One third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they thought a "typical liberal" would respond. One third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a "typical conservative."

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as "very liberal." The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with statements such as "one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" or "justice is the most important requirement for a society," liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.

 

[Nagaasha]

Why are you spreading lies?

Explaining the Zombie Bite hypothesis of YouTube Videos (ie the Alt Right Rabbithole)





What the articles inferences were based off of I'm assuming.

page 24:



Page 27:



It's an interesting paper. They actually define the AIN (Alternative Influence Network) into five categories and starts describing/defining them on Page 15:

• Liberals: Joe Rogan, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Destiny, Andrew Yang​
• Skeptics: Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson​
• Conservatives: Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, PragerU​
• Alt-Lite: Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson​
• Alt Right: Richard Spencer, Jean Francois Gariepy, and something called Red Ice TV?​

My conclusion... if those weren't conclusions you wanted drawn from the study, then you should've written it differently.

He definitely misunderstood his own data. In the paper he explicitly states that the views of the collective AIN are collectively repugnant (even the conservative and skeptic ones). In other words, he still tries to imply that anything not mainstream is radical, thus revealing his biases.

Here is the author writing in the text that radicalization from Liberal to Far-right is not dominant and deradicalization is possible. He is probably upset with the term deradicalization and people saying it makes you not racist because he likely sees conservatives as racists.

He even says as much. A sane and rational viewer would see the diminishing alt-right consumption, the increase among skeptic and conservative channels, and the lack of flow from the mainstream into the AIN (but plenty of the reverse)' and thusly conclude that the conservatives/skeptics were preventing radicalization and radicalizing. However that author still thinks of those communities as evil radicals, even though he outright states that flow from alt-right to conservative/skeptic constitutes deradicalization. It's a clear case of double-think.

Edit: That should say from the mainstream to the AIN. We know people are turning away from the mainstream, but alt-right presence is dropping. The plausible explanation being that conservative and skeptic channels are either preventing radicalization, deradicalizing radicals, or both.