Cult Leaders, Masculinity, and White Supremacy on YouTube: The Case of Stefan Molyneux

Team Members

Daniël Jurg

Maximilian Schlueter

Marc Tuters

Cecilia Vicini Ronchetti

Connor Newell

Beatrice Hillen

Adele Janulionyte

Anna Cattaneo

Contents

1. Summary of Key Findings

In general, 2013 marked a major shift in both Molyneux’s content as well as his comment section, and the pivotal moment was the Zimmerman trial. We also found that the content Molyneux produced on this event was shared and endorsed by David Duke, thus placing it on the radar of a white supremacist audience.

1. Who is Molyneux’s audience?
   1. From 2013 onwards, we can trace this influence in the dynamics of his comment section. Users that had been active until that moment either radicalised or left, and a major influx of new commenters emerged from 2013 onwards.
      
2. How do Stefan Molyneux’s commenting habits change?
   1. Moreover, we can trace this influence in Stefan Molyneux’s own commenting habits as he becomes increasingly involved with his followers. From 2015 till 2017, references to Molyneux are dominating the comment section. Building on that observation, we find that Molyneux himself, in 2014, increasingly stimulated engagement in the comments section by posting comments himself. Indeed, from 2015 up until the end of our dataset, Molyneux is the top commenter.
      
      
3. How does the content of his videos and comments change?
   1. Alongside the participatory culture, we see a clear topical shift around 2014 that highlights the libertarian to the alt-right pipeline in the comments section. Like the Zimmerman trial, spikes in engagement among Molyneux's audience align with key political moments generally associated with the far-right that highly engage his audience.

An audiovisual presentation of this report can be found here.

2. Introduction

In 2018 and 2019, a great number of stories appeared in the popular press about a generation of mostly young white men having been radicalised on YouTube. The New York Times, for instance, reported on Caleb Cain, a young boy who, in 2013, was suffering from depression and looking for ways to better his life (Roose, 2019). Given that he already spent most of his time on YouTube, he also turned to the online video platform with the question on how to better his life. Cain describes his experience at the time as falling down a rabbit hole. Following some videos about neuroplasticity, he stumbled on a series of content creators who presented themselves as self-help gurus and father figures, teaching young men how to navigate the, in their view, confusing and harsh modern world. One particular individual that had a profound impact on Cain was the self-proclaimed Canadian philosopher Stefan Molyneux. It was only after having consumed much of Molyneux’s content and having been recommended more far-right videos, that Cain found out that the self-help advice from this fatherly figure came with extreme radical ideology.

Molyneux gained a reputation for operating like a cult leader, telling children that they needed to cut ties and abandon their families if their parents did not take care of them. While starting mostly as a libertarian in his early YouTube days in 2006, Molyneux, around 2014, increasingly engaged with white supremacist talking points. For instance, Molyneux engaged in extreme debates around the so-called Great Replacement and scientific racist ideas about the biological connection between race and IQ. Furthemore, the Southern Poverty Law Center has labelled Molyneux “a libertarian internet commentator and alleged cult leader who amplifies "scientific racism," eugenics and white supremacism to a massive new audience.” Following the 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, the New Zealand Royal Commission reported that the radicalised far-right individual that entered a Mosque to kill 51 people was claimed to have consumed and donated to far-right YouTube channels such as that of Molyneux. It was only in 2020, when Molyneux had amassed a staggering one million subscribers on YouTube, the online video platform updated its terms of service and removed his content from their platform (Alexander, 2020).

Following the above-mentioned events, research into YouTube radicalization has taken off. One line of research has focused particularly on the role played by algorithmic recommendations, which on YouTube account for around 70 percent of time spent on the platform (Yesilada & Lewandowsky, 2021). Another line of investigation, critical of the technological determinism behind this line of research, has argued that YouTube ‘simply’ offers an alternative market for political content not provided by legacy media and the popularity of far-right content is part of supply and demand dynamics (Munger & Phillips, 2020). In addition, scholars highlight that in YouTube’s attention economy, ideological entrepreneurs use influence tactics to establish and maintain a dedicated fanbase. In other words, they engage in influencer drama, participate in debates and interviews with other channels, and perform qualities such as authenticity, relatability, and accountability in their videos (Lewis, 2018, 2019, 2020). Through such efforts, ideological entrepreneurs, like other YouTubers, aim to establish a parasocial relationship with their audience which can in turn increase radicalisation among followers of alt-right content creators.

One important aspect that has received less attention in the literature is that on YouTube, audiences do not merely watch content; they can edit and re-upload favourite clips in a more participatory culture style (Jenkins, 2006), or, more often, audiences perform small acts of engagement (Picone et al., 2019) via (dis)likes, shares, and comments to let content creators know what they think. On YouTube, as Lange (2009) has argued, ‘reciprocity’ is one of the defining cultural dynamics. Maddox (2021), in the context of ASMR videos, has stated that reciprocity is best understood “as transactional tingles: relaxation [or another experience] in exchange for likes, clicks, and views within the attention economy.” While this reciprocity is more easily understood regarding likes, clicks, and views, the YouTube comment section allows for a more elaborate feedback mechanism. On the one hand, comments reveal audience reception, where audiences, following Hall’s (1973) classic observation, perform dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings of video content. On the other hand, however, as Ha et al. (2022) point out, “YouTube comments have all the characteristic traits of participatory culture, meaning that it is a site of intense collective sense-making and knowledge production.” The ideological entrepreneur on YouTube thus engages audiences through the camera's lens while simultaneously creating a space for viewers to engage with other audience members in collective sense-making. Both these dynamics on YouTube strengthen parasocial ties, where pseudonymous individuals develop, adjust, share, and construct their worldviews.

This project aims to study parasocial ties in Molyneux’s community in relation to his content. More specifically, through a study of audiences’ small acts of engagement, the project aims to understand how the logic of parasocial relationships, mediated by YouTube’s infrastructure, mixes with far-right ideological discourses on white supremacy and misogyny.

3. Initial Data Sets

This project uses a unique historical dataset to study audience engagement with Stefan Molyneux. As mentioned above, Molyneux’s channel was removed in 2020 by YouTube, resulting likewise in the removal of his entire video archive. In 2019, Dutch journalists captured a wealth of political content to study radicalization on the platform. Since then, their efforts have stopped, but their data collection is now used by a.o. Daniel Jurg for further historical excavation. This collection includes a dataset of video transcripts and 1.9 million comments from 2006 to 2018 under Stefan Molyneux’s videos, including likes, dislikes, usernames, timestamps, and video ID. Using this data set allowed us to reconstruct audience engagement with Stefan Molyneux to understand the dynamics within its participatory culture.

All transcripts and comments from Molyneux’s channel from 2006 to 2018 were downloaded as a CSV file from the SQL historical YouTube database and uploaded to 4CAT, where we used various analytical modules to perform a computational grounded theory (Nelson, 2020).

4. Research Questions

The overarching research question of this project is:

1. How did Molyneux’s YouTube community evolve from its origin to his channel being deplatformed?

   1. What are the defining political moments in this evolution?

   2. What are the key changes within the comment section during this evolution?

Molyneux brands himself as a philosopher and man of logic, reason, and science. We expect to find that audiences value Molyneux’s rationality and calm demeanour. This might make his white supremacy discourse appear less based on racism and more on rationality. On the level of misogyny, we know from Caleb Cain that Molyneux mixes personal stories and an understanding of the struggles of being a young white man with a larger ideological agenda that espouses hypermasculinity and sexism. We expect to see this also captured in the comments. Ha (2021) has argued that reactionary ideological entrepreneurs on YouTube evoke discourses on so-called ‘white vulnerabilities.’ We expect that audiences might share such ‘white vulnerabilities’ in the comments section and draw connections to their (parasocial) relationship with Stefan Molyneux and hyper masculine and white supremacist ideas.

5. Methodology

We aimed to inductively map audience engagement with Molyneux using 4CAT and internet archives.

We first uploaded the dataset with the 1.9 million comments to 4CAT. To create the first graph visualising the amount of comments per month, we ran the monthly histogram feature to take note of commentary peaks in Molyneux’s channel. Secondly, we tokenized the body column per year, filtered stop words (for many languages), and lemmatised the content. Then, we visualised a rank flow diagram for the most frequently used words in the comment section by running a term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf). Thirdly, using the filter option, we filtered the original dataset by value, creating a new dataset with comments that included the word ‘white’ in the ‘body’ column. We then tokenized this new dataset, after which we used the function ‘extract co-words’ to find the words most used in combination with the term ‘white’ sorted by year, only keeping unique co-word pairs per post. To make sense of the changes in these co-word frequencies related to the term ‘white’, we traced back popular thumbnails and video titles using the wayback machine, which correlated with these most popular terms.

Fourthly, we used the ‘count values’ function to determine the top 15 commenters per year, and visualised this in a rankflow diagram. From this diagram, we selected six super-participants by their activity, favouring commenters with a longer history as top commenter over commenters with a more short-lived status as top commenter. For these six selected super-participants we filtered the dataset by their username in 4CAT, creating six separate csv files for every user with their comments to closely analyse their commenting trajectory. Moreover, we utilised the same method to analyse the commenting trajectory of Stefan Molyneux himself, since he became a super-participant himself from 2014 onwards. We then combined the seven csv files into one file, visualised this data in a timeline, and plotted every comment in different sizes depending on the amount of likes it received (the bigger the bubble, the higher the amount of likes). Lastly, we selected two quotes per participant to illustrate the evolution of their ideology.

6. Findings

Through the histogram in Fig.1, we were able to take note of the months with the most engagement, relative to comment frequency. The first major peak corresponds with both the Zimmerman trials and Molyneux’s commentary in July 2013. Indeed, the most viewed and liked video of this month is “The Truth About George Zimmerman and Treyvon Martin” published the same day of the verdicts. Interestingly, this video, along with Molyneux’s other content, was endorsed and shared by David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, on his personal blog site (seen above and captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). At the time of the data scrape, it had 1,135,366 views, 14,492 likes, and 2,516 dislikes. The second major peak is identified as April 2016 in which his interview “Race, Genetics and Intelligence | Helmuth Nyborg and Stefan Molyneux'' is one of the three better performing videos of that month, totaling 2016,666 views, 4,935 likes, and 358 dislikes at the time of the data scrape. The third and final identified peak takes place in August of 2018. This month’s most viewed video is Molyneux’s “Do You Have Any Questions Which Aren’t Race-Baiting?” which amounted to 463,386 views, 21,399 likes, and 338 dislikes when the dataset was captured. Though we did not have access to comment count in the cvs file containing all video titles, likes, dislikes, and timestamps, we estimate that the commentary peaks largely correlate to the most viewed or best performing videos of the months identified, where commenters would likely encounter a more active and engaging audience.

Using a top-word count of the nearly 2 million comments left by Molyneux’s audience, we were able to highlight dominant trends within his community and visualise it in Fig. 2. The years before 2014 demonstrate a largely libertarian discourse where popular terms include ‘government’, ‘money’, ‘market’, and ‘power’. Then, in 2014 a major shift can be seen whereby the libertarian rhetoric is suddenly replaced by terms which become much more frequent such as ‘woman’, ‘black’, ‘trump’, and ‘white’. This shift from libertarian values towards increasingly tokenized alt-right discussion points in Molyneux’s comment section attests to the changes in his content, including thumbnail style, topics, commenting habits etc. Further, we noticed a rise of the influencer Stefan, a difference from the colloquial ’Stef’.

In Fig. 3, we highlight the most significant topics per year around “white” as they were perceived by Molyneux’s community. After an in-depth analysis of the content creator’s Youtube channel through the decade for which we have a large amount of quantitative data, we traced these topics back to highly engaged-with videos to capture the critical political events that both Molyneux and mainstream media outlets were reporting on, showing the events’ influence over the discourse itself. To reiterate our earlier argument, 2013 was dominated by the Zimmerman trials, followed by the shooting of Micheal Brown and the Ferguson riots in 2014. 2015 saw a rise in dominance by the European migrant crisis and 2016 saw an increase in discussion of Black Lives Matter and, of course, Donald Trump’s election. 2017 highlights the misogynistic discourse on his channel, as made evident by the coverage of the Women’s March. Finally, in 2018 we see a surge in the conversation of white racism in South Africa. It is perhaps interesting to note that Molyneux’s style in both thumbnails and titles largely follows Youtube norms when they were published. For example, in the beginning of his Youtube residency in the late 2000s many of his videos are titled as if they were lectures (i.e., “Intro to Philosophy”) and the thumbnails are simply frames chosen from the platform from the videos itself. Then, from 2011 onwards, Molyneux begins to create more colourful thumbnails featuring text and stock images. Finally, from 2016, towards the end of both our dataset and his Youtube platform his thumbnails are increasingly saturated, black and white, and feature a lot of red in both text and images. Moreover, his titles become accusatory and utilise many capitalised characters.

Using Fig. 4, we were able to identify the top commenters under Molyneux’s videos from 2008 to 2018. This rankflow diagram provided us with information on which top commenters remained within the top 20 for multiple years, which in turn enabled us to identify six super-participants which remained within the top 20 over a considerable amount of time, enough for us to be able to track changes in their commenting behaviour. As visible in the diagram, from 2014 onwards, Stefan Molyneux himself appears in the chart as one of the top commenters and dominates the charts from 2015 to 2018.

In Fig. 5, we can see a graph plotted on a timeline from 2008 to 2018 for every super-participant identified using Fig. 4 including Stefan Molyneux himself, in which every dot signifies a comment and the size of the dot increases with the amount of likes it receives. From the graph we can deduce that from 2013 onwards, most super-participants started getting more likes, although super-participant M started getting more likes from mid-2011. Super-participant M, however, who starts commenting in 2008 and ends at the beginning of 2013, does not become more radicalised in his rhetoric. However, when super-participants start commenting before 2013 and stick around for longer after, their comments become increasingly radicalised. Stefan Molyneux started actively engaging with his audience from 2013 onwards in three ways: promotional (“Your support is essential to Freedomain radio (...)”), refutational (“not an argument kiddo”), and relational (“Merry Christmas everybody!”).

7. Discussion

To summarise, the contributions of this research are threefold.

1. Who is his audience?
   1. Stefan is well connected to his audience, and the relationship between Molyneux’s community grows as rapidly as his comment section. 2013 marks a major shift in both Molyneux’s content as well as his comment section, and the pivotal moment was the Zimmerman trial. He is heavily relying on ‘white vulnerabilities’ and ‘white guilt’ ideas, to victimise himself as well as his potential audience. We also found that the content Molyneux produced on this event was shared and endorsed by David Duke, thus placing it on the radar of a white supremacist audience. From that moment onwards, we can trace this influence in the dynamics of his comment section.
2. How do commenting habits within Molyneux’s community change?
   1. Radicalisation within his digital community was strongly impacted by political events, i.e. Zimmerman trial and the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Spikes in engagement among Molyneux's audience align with key political moments generally associated with the far-right that highly engage his audience, usually increasing the comments under those types of videos. Users that had been active until that moment either radicalise or leave, and a major influx of new commenters emerges from 2013 onwards.
3. How does the content of his videos and comments change?
   1. Stefan Molyneux begins his Youtube career as a philosophy channel but later begins to include his own political views into his content. Alongside the participatory culture, we see a clear topical shift around 2014 that highlights the libertarian to the alt-right pipeline in the comments section. This shift is later radicalised as his videos develop from libertarian into alt-right discourse. Like the Zimmerman trial, spikes in engagement among Molyneux's audience align with key political moments generally associated with the far-right that highly engage his audience.

8. Limitations

The results of this research should be interpreted with caution due to the following limitations:

1. Transcripts of the videos were unusable. The datasheet of this project included not only 1.9 million comments from Molyneux’s videos, but their transcripts as well. The transcripts, auto-generated by Youtube, were incoherent and difficult to understand. Thus, we were not able to analyse it.

2. Datasets lack information about dislikes and replies to the comments. Meaning that we were not able to see the dislikes of the comments, which made analysing the opinions of his audience less clear. Likes and dislikes in comments can be used to gauge the general sentiment of a community's discussion. Likes and dislikes can also be used as a way to encourage participation in a discussion. If someone receives a lot of likes on their comment or post, then that might encourage them to continue participating in the discussion. Yet, working with only likes can make the discourse distorted.

Analysis of Youtube's affordances. It is possible that the changes in commenting by Stefan and his followers can be partially attributed to Youtube's features and the advancements of its infrastructure. This was not explored in the analysis, although it could be a topic for further research.

9. Conclusion

From this research it can be concluded that radicalisation (or at the very least a drastic change in discourse) within an online community or digital culture does not happen in a vacuum. Political events strongly correlated with comment and content changes in Molyneux’s community. Thus, we cannot overestimate the role of algorithmic recommendations, falling into the trap of technological determinism, in which the algorithm is over credited for its role in online radicalisation (Yesilada & Lewandowsky, 2021). However, we also cannot underestimate the role the affordances of a digital platform like YouTube play in enhancing community building in this case study, since Stefan Molyneux does use influence tactics to create parasocial relationships with his followers. Thus, the popularity of far-right content is not simply part of supply and demand dynamics (Munger & Phillips, 2020). Taking a more in-depth look at how Molyneux’s content has changed in relation to Youtube’s evolution of its affordances can help us further understand the role these affordances play in the radicalisation of online communities.

Despite some limitations, one of the implications that arose in conducting this research is tied to the importance of internet archives as content moderation and de-platformization become norms for platform conduct. In-depth research and analysis of content creators who have been banned and whose accounts or channels are completely deleted from a platform cannot be completed without some use of internet archives, such as the Wayback Machine. Though some digital communities may be found harmful to the overall environment of a certain platform, their radicalisation and their internal dynamics may still include vital information for further academic analyses dealing with alt-right communities.

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