The alt-right has been busy building itself an alternative version of the internet. Pick a social media platform, and in the last couple of years you can bet that the alt-right has taken a crack at creating its own version. There’s Gab (alt-Twitter), WrongThink (alt-Facebook), Voat (alt-Reddit) and PewTube (alt-YouTube). There’s even an alt-right Wikipedia, Infogalactic. On its homepage, the “In the News” box blames Netflix’s dip in new subscriptions on its “far-left programming.”
If you ever stumble across these alternative sites, it might take a few seconds for you to clock that you’ve happened upon one of the alt-right’s online enclaves. Infogalactic is built with MediaWiki, the same open-source software behind Wikipedia, while Voat is based on an old version of the open-sourced code behind Reddit. At a glance, they are mirror images of the sites they exist to oppose, just warped, funhouse-style, towards hate and conspiracy.
Things, however, are not going well on the alt-right’s internet. Bedeviled by technical faults and stymied by other platforms, hosting sites and payment providers, the alternative internet is limping its way forward, ever so slowly, while it faces a final plunge into online obscurity. Maybe because the alt-right never needed its own version of internet. The real alt-right internet? You’re already on it.
By a long margin, Gab is the alternative internet’s biggest success story. Founded in August 2016, the website now has 480,000 users according to founder Andrew Torba, although he doesn’t say how many of those accounts are active. He set up the website in the wake of a Trump rally in San José in June 2016, when protestors attacked Trump supporters. His site is an alternative to Twitter and Facebook which he argues are biased against conservatives. “There’s an illusion of choice, but there really is no choice,” he says. “Effectively they have become the de facto internet – it’s an oligopoly.”
One of section of Gab, called Introduce Yourself, reveals how some people end up on the website. “Twitter banned yet again,” wrote a user called Michelle. “This time for making a joke I guess they took offence to. Trump support. Anti-Islam. Anti-refugee. Dog lover.” Another user, who went by the name JSM, said they were checking out to see whether Gab was a “viable alternative” to Facebook and Twitter. “I’m tired of feeling like a second class citizen on those platforms,” they wrote.
“There are so many people that share these views that cannot express them anywhere,” says Torba, who describes most Gab users as “libertarian conservatives, normal, working class, blue-collar people”. On the recommend users tab, a recent top result was for an account called End Cultural Marxism, a pro user paying a subscription fee for a handful of additional features such as extended character accounts and live streaming. Its most recent post declares that “we whites need our own ethno-states too” in response to a Tweet by Rick Wilson, a Republican political strategist and author. Beneath it, the account has posted Wilson’s email address.
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But aside from a core group of super-posters, which includes the likes of Alex Jones, Gab is something of a ghost town. Not long after its founding, alt-right self-promoters including Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich flocked to the platform, with that pair alone racking up 88,000 followers between them. Now it has been three months since Yiannopoulos’ last post and more than a year since Cernovich last took to the platform.
Out of the top ten Gab users (by follower count) identified in an academic paper published in March 2018, only three of them have posted in the last month. The same study found that 43 per cent of users on the platform aren’t following a single user. Despite this, Torba thinks that his platform could be as big as Drudge Report, a popular right-wing news aggregator. “There’s no reason why we can’t see all 45 million of those [users] on Gab,” he says.
Through pro subscriptions and by taking a percentage of on-site donations, Gab is almost breaking even, and Torba has plans to use this financial stability to host the site independently. Last year, Gab’s domain registrar, AsiaRegistry, asked the site to take down a post mocking Heather Heyer, a woman murdered at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in August 2017. Late this year, Torba plans to give people the the opportunity to buy equity in Gab through a token sale. He says that he’s already received pledges amounting to $5.2 million dollars in future funding.
Tim Squirrell, an academic who focuses on extreme online communities, is not so bullish about the future of the alt-right online. For a start, it’s really difficult for people to move to these niche networks from existing platforms, he says. “There are straight up barriers to entry – you don’t transfer your existing social network on there, you just don’t have that same kind of following.”
“The unifying feature that these people have is that they are angry about censorship,” says Squirrell. The founder of the alt-Facebook, WrongThink, who goes by the screen name Bane Biddix, says that most of the people who end up on his website have been turned off of other platforms, including Gab. “It’s a little bit from everything,” he writes during an exchange of messages on Twitter. “Dissents from Gab, Twitter and Facebook. Some due to censorship, data breaches, and other things.”
Bane estimates that his site, which has 2,500 monthly active users, is growing by between 200 and 300 users each month. Although, the alt-right tends to dominate, he argues that his site features a broad range of people, including feminists and communists. “I think that alt-tech, if I can call it this, is for everyone, not just the alt-right,” he says.
Although it may have been designed with everyone in mind, WrongThink skews in one direction: to the far-right. A sidebar of the platform’s ‘pro’ users is a smorgasbord of the usual alt-right talking points: white nationalism, Holocaust denial and Hitler worship.
It’s no surprise that sites purporting to allow a range of views quickly become dominated by the alt-right, says Squirrell. People with less extreme views would be quickly put off by the deluge of hate running through the alt-web. “Everything is just racism, it’s awful,” he says.
The non-alternative internet isn’t helping. “They have quite a big problem with drawing in moderates,” Squirrell adds. In August 2017, the Gab app was booted from the Play Store for violating Google’s rules on hate speech. Apple, too, has consistently thwarted Gab’s attempts to get through the App Store approval process, although Torba says that he hopes a version of the app that filters out specific words might eventually squeeze through. Since February 2018, Hatreon, the alt-right answer to Patreon, has been unable to process payments, although the reason for this is unclear.
But the rest of the world doesn’t even need to clamp down on the alternative web to relegate it to irrelevancy. The reason why these echo chambers are mostly ghost towns, Squirrell says, is that they deprive posters of the one thing that many of them crave: attention. “A huge amount of the culture that these people have is that they want to trigger as many people as possible,” he says.
And to do that, you’re better off on the real internet. “If you want to produce something that will eventually get out into the world, 4chan is the place to do it,” Squirrel says. On Reddit’s r/thedonald there is an endless stream of alt-right content, a far cry from the relative desert of alt-Reddit, Voat. On Twitter and Facebook there are plenty of liberals to bait and there’s always the chance of going viral and reaching millions of eyeballs. And far from clamping down on hate speech, in an interview with Recode, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to allow Holocaust deniers to share their views on his platform.
With the president of the United States espousing an agenda that could have come straight off the homepage of Infowars or Breitbart, there’s not much that’s alternative about the online far right. “Their views have been mainstreamed,” Squirrell says, with the alt-right already dominating conversations across social media. The alternative internet, it turns out, is becoming surplus to requirements.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
