REPLAY: YouTube's Alt-Right Rabbit Hole (with Caleb Cain)

Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts chat with Caleb Cain about his experience being radicalized by the Alt-Right internet.

[While the HBS hosts are on break between Seasons, we're releasing REPLAYs of some of our favorite episodes from the past. This episode is from Season 5 and originally aired on August 22, 2022.]

In June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled “The Making of a YouTube Radical.” That piece was meant to highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which has been proven many times over to promote what (in internet slang) is called “red-pilling”—that is, the conversion of users to far-right beliefs. Today, we’re talking to Caleb Cain, a person who has been down the alt-right rabbit hole and somehow found his way back out of it, and we want to introduce our listeners to a first-person account of how right-wing radicalization actually happens on the internet, how it is sustained, and how it might be combatted.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-68-youtubes-alt-right-rabbit-hole/

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