Far-Right creators and their audiences - the discursive negotiation of identity on Reddit and YouTube during the US Presidential Election 2020

Reactionary and far right creators have established a strong presence on YouTube, becoming political influencers and disseminating their ideas to a wide audience. YouTube has been demonstrated to be a pipeline of extremism, funneling viewers towards the far right through a combination of algorithms, platforms norms, and presenter practices. A number of these YouTubers have unaffiliated fan communities on Reddit where users congregate to discuss and disseminate content. However, research on the far right on YouTube tends to focus predominantly on the presenters themselves or YouTube comments in isolation. Focusing on Tim Pool and his fan community on Reddit, this paper offers an understanding of the discursive interaction between a far right content creator and their receptive audience. Through a mixed methods approach of inter- and intra-platform discourse analysis in conjunction with SNA, this paper will elaborate on the discursive negotiation of identity, and ideas such as democracy, during the US 2020 Presidential Election and attempted insurrection. With Pool deemed a ‘superspreader’ of election misinformation (EIP 2021) and a ‘sanitised conduit to the far right’ (Silverman 2021) it is critical to understand how discourse evolves and is received by the users most aligned with him. References: Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, & Stanford Internet Observatory. ‘The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election’. 2021. Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership. https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-Report.pdf Silverman, R. (2021) ‘How ‘Coward and Phony’ Tim Pool Became One of the Biggest Political YouTubers on the Planet’ The Daily Beast [online] Available at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-coward-and-phony-tim-pool-became-one-of-the-biggest-political-youtubers-on-the-planet