Mapping the Alt-Right during the Canadian Federal Election

The project is designed to analyze the influence that alt-right political commentators have on the Canadian 2019 Federal Election through YouTube and other mainstream social media platforms. Underneath the discourses and social profiles of mainstream social media platforms lies a web of mostly anonymized, ideologically far-right deep web communities tied together by primary discourses of ironic banter, conspiracy theories, and fake news narratives. Over the last two years, deep web products such as QAnon, Pizzagate, and others have made their way onto mainstream platforms through YouTube commentary, and these discourses perpetuate themselves due to YouTube’s specific platform affordances such as the autoplay algorithm, the related videos algorithm, and the bonds created by consuming news through audiovisual commentary – a phenomenon that projects to grow as an increasing supermajority of younger generations use YouTube as their primary source for political and current event news. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Greg Elmer

Student:

Partner:

University of Amsterdam

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

Toronto Metropolitan University

Program: