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Alt-right blogger Vox Day/Theodore Beale has taken to linking to Russia Today as a news source on topics various and sundry, making his site an interesting test case for studying the injection of Kremlin state media into the Western extreme right. #AltWankers
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Presently, RT is the third most frequently shared media source on Vox Day's blog (links to the author's own businesses/promotion thereof are excluded), but it wasn't always so. Back in 2012, the blog linked a mix of MSM and far-right Western sites, with a side of sci-fi.
We indexed the links to media websites on voxday . blogspot . com from 2012-01-01 through 2019-05-17 (10865 posts total.) The proportion of links to Russia Today increases over time in tandem with a decrease in mainstream sites; far-right Western sources are present throughout.
Less noticeable but still noticeable: the volume of posts mentioning "Russia" or "Putin" has also increased over time (as has the category related to Jews.) The chart contains a few other interesting details for those who care to look closely.
Same analysis for the comments section (1034849 comments within the date range analyzed.) We see a massive spike in links to RT in 2015/2016, coinciding with the 2016 presidential campaign. Also, 8chan? Seriously?
The topics discussed in the comment section largely mirror the blog posts, with the (almost entirely anti-Semitic) Judaism-related category being even more prevalent. In contrast with the blog posts themselves, interest in Trump is absent prior to his campaign.
