When Reactors Turn Reactionary
Why have so many reaction video channels on YouTube been pivoting from comics, cars, and classic rock to a specific aesthetic of right-wing political content?
The recent exposé of the pro-Russian and Russian-run Tenet Media influence operation in this American election year has raised serious issues with transparency in funding of political content on online platforms. That operation—though it escaped detection for a time—was still traceable from an incorporated entity, through a communication/transaction trail, to big-name pro content creators.
What may have slipped under the radar is covert activity involving the “long tail” of content creation, often in the form of reaction videos. These are some of the easiest content forms to produce, involving no scripting or deep research, often making use of a suite of specialized tools to overlay/splice in the content being reacted to, and to obfuscate/clip it to keep it within limits of legal “fair use”. While being about as vulnerable to broad audience capture as would be bigger channels, these also more heavily rely on crowdfunding—as opposed to big funder organizations or endorsement sponsors—for their revenue streams.
Trouble is, while having an institutional funder tends to leave a public record, and having a commercial sponsor tends to require public disclosure, crowdfunding can set a content agenda while funneling cash to creators anonymously, via separate patronage crowdfunding platforms, or via on-platform monetization features like premium memberships, gratuity drops, and “super-chats” (or equivalents).
It would be exceedingly easy for an influence operation to, say, create a small army of monetization-capable on-platform accounts and/or dedicated patronage platform accounts, and use those to make and even boost suggestions of content for creators to react to, all while operating under pseudonyms and behind avatars, both evading requirements for commercial sponsorship disclosure and avoiding leaving formal transaction trails. Even without the anonymity, “suggestions” of content as a “patron” or “member” can take place without either form of transparency.
That brings me to the point of this post: a weird pattern of YouTube channels—mostly of reaction videos—pivoting from entertainment or sports content to right-wing content with a distinctive aesthetic and language.
Nearly all made this pivot within this past year. Many made the pivot very suddenly.
Where the creators are visible, most of the channels are run by people appearing to be ethnic minorities. The pre-pivot reaction content was apolitical and mundane—usually ranging across classic rock and pop, K-pop, contemporary rap, standup comedy, and sports, with occasional manhwa (Korean comics) and other pop culture topics.
Most of the ones I identified pivoted to right-wing content in a US context, reacting to content supporting Republican party presidential candidate Donald Trump, and attacking those criticizing him, as well as attacking Democratic party presidential candidate, Kamala Harris—Trump’s biggest opponent in the race.
Earlier this year, some of those channels were also increasingly featuring reactions to content attacking Fani Willis and Letitia James (who were leading prosecutions of Trump), as well as attacking Whoopi Goldberg and other hosts of The View.
The few others I identified made a pivot to right-wing content in a UK/EU context, primarily engaging in immigration catastrophizing and broadly “anti-woke” content.
The post-pivot aesthetic often involved a similar pattern of caption/arrow/highlight overlays. Observed was also the frequent use of certain phrases like “THIS JUST HAPPENED“ in thumbnails across channels. In some cases, I would scroll down page after page of “THIS JUST HAPPENED“ thumbnails.
When pivoting wasn’t sudden, it involved increasing frequency of reaction to videos by or featuring conservative personalities like psychologist Jordan Peterson, economist Thomas Sowell, and rapper Tom MacDonald. While it is a possibility that those channels’ creators were genuinely “red-pilled” by this content, it’s also possible that an infop operator might feed this kind of content through monetized “fan suggestion” channels, to smoothen out the segue to political content for both the creator and audience.
A particularly interesting case was that of a personality who maintains three channels (which I was able to link using the common email address, linked alts, and other features), one of which made a hard pivot about 6 months ago from automobile content to pro-Trump, anti-Harris content; one other of which had the latter content, but was somehow scrubbed and re-handled twice, now only featuring a harmless-looking family video; and the third having only political content.
Most curiously, I was able to find a few gig postings on the Upwork platform, requesting work on YouTube channels modeled on some of the ones I identified featuring this pattern. Two of the three channels I found referenced in the Upwork postings suspiciously disappeared, as did the postings themselves.
Given the opacity around “long tail” crowdfunding, it’s hard to say whether all, most, or any of these are actually the results of influence operations. I’m putting this information out there so we can have a conversation about increasing transparency and accountability across the length of the platform content beast, especially at this politically urgent moment.
I conclude with this video from one of the channels of interest (archived here), and a screenshot of the important portion from the transcript.
My thanks to
for first pointing out and archiving some of these channels.Links and notes (includes a list of suspicious channels that started with pol ragebait content, on a separate sheet): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/191zd821BAfJAc52VbWJ1kbsi3lRIjlAswIWBnNWjUW8/edit?usp=sharing
Screencap archives (separate folders for those that pivoted to and started with pol content): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19aBmqNrMhZ_leZtDRBzrirvxYzR0Q4JZ?usp=drive_link
Please feel free to peruse these, and reach out to me with tips, questions, or feedback.