If you were reading Twitchy Sunday, you likely caught our piece on The New York Times’ Kevin Roose and the article he’s spent months researching, which the paper then turned into a bunch of pretty graphics showing how YouTube led to the radicalization of young Caleb Cain, who logged onto YouTube and “spent the next 4 years falling down a far-right rabbit hole.”
Roose used Cain’s entire 12,000-video YouTube history to reconstruct “his journey from the left to the far-right and back.” (It’s a happy ending then; he ends up on the left … but never the far-left, because there is no such thing, and neither is Antifa, so of course they don’t use social media to organize.)
So, yeah, it was just one guy. We hadn’t seen the piece in print, but Julie Borowski took a photo of it and we see screenshots of Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro (of course), and … Milton Friedman? We thought Alex Jones was the problem and once he was gone this would all blow over.
Milton Friedman is a YouTube radical. pic.twitter.com/c0LDX9CfqE
— Julie Borowski (@JulieBorowski) June 10, 2019
Wait, what?!
— The Salty Solstice (@geauxducks79) June 10, 2019
Yes, yes he is, with radical ideas that cut against the conventional wisdom of both parties like that government should be small and let people decide how best to spend their own money. https://t.co/YYqF6LaXwa
— Pilot Pundit (@captainkudzu) June 10, 2019
Radical dude.
— Bryce Eickholt (@BryceEickholt) June 10, 2019
Only someone as radical as Friedman can come back from the dead to radicalize other white people.
— Chris Arrr (@capitalistpeeg) June 10, 2019
He uploads hateful content to YouTube from the afterlife using the Heaven/Hell Transfer Protocol.
— adi sivasankaran (@adiedx) June 10, 2019
Dang.
— Julie Borowski (@JulieBorowski) June 10, 2019
Wonder if YouTube will pull down all videos of radical economist Friedman now that they’ve apparently cleansed any reference to Hitler or the Nazis from the platform, destroying educational archives in the process.
It's almost like the caption on the image says it is commentators from across the political spectrum.
— NicholasVenture (@NicholasVenture) June 10, 2019
And yet the article only talks about right wing radicalization. Hmmm
— Michael Capanelli (@carbon_unit_71) June 10, 2019
He should be banned.
(sarcasm)
— Brian Curci ?? (@ecosnow) June 10, 2019
Advocating for free markets is hate speech.
— RedPilledLibertarian (@DlkDan) June 10, 2019
"Triggered by Monetarism" LOL
— First Amendment Absolutist (@First_Am_) June 10, 2019
I was literally raised on Milton Friedman’s view of economics. I never missed an episode of Free to Choose, which aired on that “radical, extremist: TV network PBS sometime during the late 1970s. You can now watch this series on YouTube…and if you haven’t seen it, you should. https://t.co/C4t8aIUSuf
— Ken Gardner (@KenGardner11) June 10, 2019
Was surprised that Thomas Sowell didn’t make the collage. He radicalized me in to basic economics.
— S. Ohh (@SamBK71) June 10, 2019
Oh good. They're doing that thing again where they just lump in half actual "radicals" with people who just say inconvenient stuff.
I'm sure this won't lead to a larger swath of people who outright dismiss certain names and faces because they've been told to.
— The Good Captain Sweet (@CapnSweet) June 10, 2019
Wow. That’s ridiculous.
— NotRealLife (@NotRealLife1) June 10, 2019
The New York Times isn’t saying that Ben Shapiro is an alt-right radical (though the media claims that all the time); it’s just that if young impressionable people watch and like Shapiro, who knows? They might watch a Milton Friedman video and down the rabbit hole they go.
We’d better shut this whole YouTube thing down until we figure out what’s going on.
Related:
‘And you get paid for this’?! NYT journo’s thread claiming the far-right used YouTube to radicalize followers goes SO wrong https://t.co/bIYblmbtJ5
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 9, 2019
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