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1. This great reporting by @kevinroose on the very "internet-y" feel of the NZ shooter's manifesto got me thinking about the links (and divergences) between P*wd*epie and the Yippies of the late 60s. nytimes.com/2019/03/18/pod…
2. The late 60s saw the convergence of a host of progressive movements--civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, anti-war, anti-colonialism, etc. Amidst this stew of anti-establishmentarianism emerged gonzo cultural figures, like the Yippies. pbs.org/independentlen…
3. When I watch a P*wd*epie video, I'm reminded of figures like Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman. There's a "middle finger to the world" playfulness & rebelliousness that can serve as a catch basin for a host of anti-establishment resentments that point in many political directions.
4. As we know with the Yippies, the young people drawn to that world and its cultural forms took different paths in the 1970s and afterwards. Jerry Rubin famously became a businessman and stockbroker. Hoffman remained on the left. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rub…
5. Some of the folks inspired by Yippie-dom got into formal politics thru McGovern-ite progressivism. Some joined the Weather Underground. Some found themselves traveling down conspiracy theory rabbit holes on AM radio shows as depicted wonderfully here. slate.com/articles/podca…
6. But if Yippiedom was a gonzo counterculture that pointed many different political directions, YouTube's algorithm seems invested in making P*wd*epie's audience slide only rightward. This is where the intersection of social media technology and politics becomes relevant.
7. As an experiment, I clicked on a P*di*p*e video on YouTube and these were the only political recommendations it gave me. 
8. I then clicked on the Shapiro video and these are the only political recommendations it gave me.
9. Most of the recommendations from the original P*di*p*e video were to other videos by him. But the only political ones pointed me rightward. And then those sent me sliding ever further rightward, without a single exception.
10. It would be like if one went to a Yippie event in 1970, and the only folks handing out literature were the LaRouche-ites, the neo-confederate libertarians, and the Young Americans for Freedom....no socialists, no communists, no Black Panthers, no feminist groups.
11. Young people are attracted to P*wd*ep*e for many of the same non-political reasons they were drawn to the Yippies. But what happened when they came to a Yippie event is that they got introduced to many different political persuasions.
12. For whatever reason, YouTube has tilted the table to the right so that a politically curious kid who comes to P*wdi*p*e just for the lulz gets drawn immediately into the right-leaning intellectual dark web, and *only in that direction.*
13. And once a kid is in that dark web, never (from my experience on YouTube) are they presented with a countervailing viewpoint. Every time I've clicked on a Ben Shapiro or J*rdan P*terson video, I have never once been recommended a video that seeks to debunk them.
14. Maybe it's just that the right has been more entrepreneurial and creative in its use of social media. I don't know how to explain this, but it does strike me as a dynamic we need to be talking about, especially folks who have kids.
15. Several years ago my then 12 year old son started watching videos of a young guy (P*wd*ep*e, it turns out) screaming very loudly while playing video games. I'd watch with him sometimes. I didn't get the humor (by design, of course), but they seemed harmless.
16. My son eventually tired of P*wd*e, and then in late 2016/early 2017 he started telling me about how that gamer guy he used to like was saying anti-semitic stuff and using the n-word. variety.com/2017/digital/n…
17. Some of my son's friends were defending P*wd*ep*e, saying it was just for fun, just pushing peoples' buttons, tweaking the nose of the PC/SJW police, just like a sh*tposter or a meme-warrior trying to get laughs and attention.
18. And now, regardless of P*wd*e's politics (about which I know nothing and am making no claims) he's been invoked by the NZ shooter and someone who vandalized the Brooklyn Holocaust Memorial.
19. I am a firm believer in the importance of free speech. I also know that every technological development in the realm of communications has required us to rethink what freedom looks like in a new, technological context.
20. Free speech is valuable because it forces us to encounter & engage with competing views of the world. It makes us smarter. That is decidedly NOT what seems to be happening on YouTube these days, rather it seems to be functioning as a politically-tilted indoctrination machine.
21. We need to be having a conversation about what freedom of speech looks like in the age of social media, because I think it's safe to say that what we have now is not working.
22. Freedom and the absence of power are not the same thing...ask anyone who's ever lived in a failed state. Or ask the 18th century politicians who wrote the Constitution, who knew that political liberty and political power were mutually constitutive, not contradictory.
23. A must read thread on the bad faith with which most conservative "free speech warriors" engage with the real dilemmas of defining free speech in the age of social media.
