There are a million different ways YouTube could have been, and could be now, taking action. So why didn’t YouTube take action sooner, and what should they be doing now? On Monday, with the release of the Royal Commission’s inquiry into the attacks, we got a fuller picture: the Christchurch shooter was radicalized on YouTube, by many of the propagandists myself and other researchers had warned about. The shooter’s manifesto clearly spelled out his racist and Islamophobic beliefs, but it provided scant information on how he came to embrace them.

He had been radicalized to believe in the Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims that white populations are being purposefully replaced with (often Muslim) immigrants. Throughout the chaos of the day, researchers parsed his manifesto and found that under the layers of irony and memes, the message was quite clear. The following March, I watched in horror along with much of the rest of the world, as a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people and injured 40 more at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the process, they made it extremely easy for a viewer to move bit by bit into more extremist content. Tethered together by a shared opposition to “social justice warriors” and the mainstream media, they frequently collaborated with each other and amplified each other’s content. Specifically, I identified a loosely connected network of reactionary YouTubers, ranging from mainstream conservatives and libertarians all the way to overt white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who were all broadcasting their political ideas to young audiences. In the fall of 2018, I released a research report warning of a growing trend of far-right radicalization on YouTube.

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