With a large dataset of far-right YouTube channels, we analysed the genre of ‘Internet bloodsports’, touching on on a particular moment in 2020 where extreme speech spread across the platform.
Written by Emillie de Keulenaar, Marc Tuters, Cassian Osborne-Carey, Daniel Jurg, and Ivan Kistjes, the text operationalises the concept of ‘extreme speech’ to an analysis of a right-wing ‘Bloodsports’ debate subculture on YouTube. Highlighting the topic of ‘race realism’, it develops a novel mixed-methods approach: repurposing the far-right website Metapedia as a corpus to detect unique terms related to the issue. The text uses this corpus to analyze the transcripts and comments from an archive of 950 right-wing channels, collected from 2008 until 2018.
The empirical study identifies a market for extreme speech on the platform, which came into public view in 2017.
