Extremists Are Cashing in on a Youth-Targeted Gaming Website
White supremacists and other extremists have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars through a youth-targeted, video livestreaming service called DLive, according to a researcher of online, far-right communities.
Megan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University who has focused on the migration of white supremacists across mainstream social media platforms and fringe websites throughout the Trump era. Squire submitted research to Southern Poverty Law Center that shows a handful of leaders of the global white nationalist movement are raising significant sums of money through DLive.聽These leaders include聽pro-Trump pundit Nick Fuentes, Patrick Casey of American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa),聽British neo-Nazi 聽and Austria鈥檚 Martin Sellner of , who became infamous for 聽who murdered 51 Muslims in a 2019 terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Matthew Q. Gebert, a State Department official who led the Washington, D.C.-area chapter of a white nationalist organization, also recently started livesteaming on DLive.
, a self-described comedian of the white supremacist-friendly 鈥渁lt-right鈥 movement who was removed from mainstream websites after making statements , is also making significant amounts of money from the youth-targeted website. In September, Benjamin called DLive a 鈥済reat service,鈥 saying that one of the platform鈥檚 perks was that 鈥測oung Zoomers鈥 could see him livestreaming 鈥渙n the front page because I鈥檓 their number-one earner now.鈥
Like Benjamin, the extremists Squire identified to Hatewatch are people who have been suspended or removed from mainstream social media sites and payment processors. DLive is currently providing these figures a lifeline both to promote their content and make a living from it, Squire noted. Fuentes, a 22-year-old white nationalist who has promoted Holocaust denial on his shows and advocated for the use of state violence to kill protesters, cashed out a bit over $68,900 from April 16 through Oct. 22 on DLive, according to Squire鈥檚 research. Though he has been suspended from websites and payment processors including YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, Discord, PayPal, Streamlabs, TikTok and Stripe, Fuentes is currently making roughly $326 per day off of DLive, roughly equal to a salary of $119,000 per year. Indeed, Squire found, he brought in nearly $5,000 on election night alone. Fuentes loaned credence to Squire鈥檚 findings on Sept. 14, when he tweeted that he made over $75,000 per year, referring to the for a coronavirus stimulus check.
DLive is a fringe platform, meaning that it reaches a niche internet audience, and researchers of the far right have until now failed to track it as closely as such counterparts as YouTube and Twitch. The comparative isolation of DLive relative to those bigger platforms has at times offered far-right personalities an opportunity to be more openly extreme. For example, Fuentes talked about giving President Trump a 鈥淩oman salute鈥 on a livestream hosted there in August, following the close of the Republican National Convention. The term 鈥淩oman salute,鈥 sometimes called a Hitler salute, refers to the infamous arm gesture used by Nazis.
锘库淚 don鈥檛 want to see anyone Roman saluting,鈥 Fuentes said on a DLive stream, urging his followers to avoid being caught identifying publicly with Nazism, as more senior figures in the movement 聽had done. 鈥淚 want to so bad right now, though. I want to Roman salute my president so bad.鈥
Like the more highly trafficked Twitch, DLive is primarily known as a video-game livestream platform, one in which users stream themselves playing games while talking to an audience. For that reason, its audience skews young. Squire described the website to Hatewatch as being 鈥済amified.鈥 DLive participants are incentivized to stay online for hours at a time, because they are rewarded with credit for doing so.
Credits are accrued over time by watching livestreams aired on DLive and come in the form of 鈥渓emons,鈥 with each lemon valuing at $0.012. The fake currency lemons, which are more commonly accrued by a user transferring money into their own account, can then be turned into cash donations, given from DLive account holders to extremists. The donations come in packages of one, 10, 100, 1,000 or 10,000 lemons. The lemons are represented by colorful, cartoon icons, resembling something one might see on a child鈥檚 game or in a slot machine. An ice cream cone represents ten lemons, while a diamond signifies 100 lemons. A聽鈥淣injaghini鈥 cartoon of a ninja driving a car stands for 1,000 lemons. Ten thousand lemons are called a 鈥淣injet鈥 and are represented by a happy-looking cartoon of a ninja riding a plane. Squire told Hatewatch that while this system of transferring money may seem juvenile and unorthodox, extremist users feel at home while using it.
鈥淲hen I started systematically collecting DLive financial data I was very surprised to see that the top earners on the platform 鈥 by far 鈥 are white nationalist Nick Fuentes and 鈥榓lt-right鈥 entertainer Owen Benjamin,鈥 Squire said of her findings. 鈥淭hese guys aren't like normal internet users 鈥 if a platform is weird or fringe, that鈥檚 not necessarily a turn-off for them. Especially if that platform is offering a way to turn hateful speech into cash.鈥
Hatewatch reached out to DLive CEO Charles Wayn for comment on this story. Wayn himself donated $90 to Jaden McNeil, one of the extremists on Squire鈥檚 list, on June 23. Hatewatch also reached out to Fuentes, Casey, Collett and Benjamin. They did not reply.
An extremist-friendly alternative to YouTube
Wayn launched DLive in 2017. The site markets itself as the 鈥渨orld鈥檚 first and largest streaming platform on blockchain.鈥 Blockchain refers to a way to store information, such as financial records, in a decentralized, electronic manner. DLive鈥檚 descriptor loosely refers to the same information storage system employed by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Instead of relying on advertising revenue, DLive uses its own currency directly through its site, which forms its basis in blockchain technology. The decentralized nature of the platform also means that the company does not take a substantial cut of the revenue accrued by a DLive user, making it slightly more lucrative for extremists on a per-donation basis than features like , Squire said. In October, the company was acquired by peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent as part of an effort to build a network of decentralized platforms.
Even though DLive was founded in 2017, it earned its first major coup against video streaming giant YouTube in early 2019. The tension between YouTube and streamers, whether born out of economic concerns or the result of deplatforming, has contributed to the growth of DLive over the last two years. 鈥淒eplatforming鈥 describes the action of tech companies stopping a person or group, typically those who give voice to an extreme ideology, from using their websites.
One of the first major migrations from YouTube to DLive took place in early 2019, when the popular online entertainer Felix Kjellberg, known online as 鈥淧ewDiePie,鈥 聽he would be livestreaming exclusively there. While Kjellberg claimed the decision was largely driven by financial considerations, some of those who later embraced DLive, particularly on the far-right, were also driven to the site after being deplatformed from more mainstream video streaming services, such as YouTube. (Kjellberg did not follow through on his promise and continues to stream on YouTube to an audience of over 100 million subscribers.)
Benjamin, the self-described comedian with a history of espousing virulently , joined DLive after being deplatformed from YouTube on Dec. 3, 2019.
鈥淲e鈥檝e doubled our livestream numbers. 鈥 There鈥檚 no 鈥榞rabbling,鈥欌 Benjamin said on his first DLive stream, aired on Dec. 5, 2019. The term 鈥済rabbler鈥 or 鈥済rabbling鈥 has been used by Benjamin to refer derogatorily to Jewish people.
鈥淲e feel better being in a place that doesn鈥檛 hate us,鈥 he said.
A new fundraising tool for extremists
Squire tracked the transactions made by 75聽extremist accounts, starting on April 16, when DLive initiated its current system of financial exchange. Though only 56 of these accounts had received donations, she found the extremists she selected for review netted a total of $465,572.43 in donations between April 16 and late October.
The top three extremist earners on Squire鈥檚 list pulled in over a third of that total amount. Benjamin netted $62,250.75, leading the group. Fuentes was next, and Casey of American Identity Movement came in third.
Thirteen streamers, including the top three, received over $10,000. Many of these high earners included individuals associated with both Fuentes and Casey鈥檚 so-called 鈥淕royper鈥 movement, which is an internet slang word for a younger skewing group of white nationalists. Jaden McNeil, head of the Kansas State America First Student chapter and an associate of both Fuentes and Casey, and the extremist to whom Wayn donated money, pulled in over $32,200. 鈥淪halit,鈥 a pseudonymous contributor to a junk news website skewed to a younger white nationalist audience, made about the same. Ethan Ralph, a streamer and podcaster who featured numerous prominent white nationalists on his YouTube show before the company suspended his account, received over $24,300. Red Ice TV, a white nationalist propaganda show that was also purged from YouTube, made over $17,300.
DLive users donate frequently in small amounts, often providing multiple donations throughout the course of a livestream. Still, Squire found that some extremists had received hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars from a single donor throughout this period. One user, who goes by the name 鈥渢based鈥 on DLive, donated some $7,303.85 to Patrick Casey, $4,963.48 to Fuentes, and another $3,688.95 to McNeil during this time. The same user also donated between several hundred to a few thousand dollars to far-right streamers such as shalit and Jesse Lee Peterson, a far-right Christian radio host who has platformed white supremacists such as 聽of the Daily Stormer and 聽of American Renaissance. Peterson has been infamously 聽as saying, 鈥淭hank God for slavery,鈥 suggesting it got Black people out of Africa and into the U.S. But he has also connected in the past with extremist groups such as Federation for American Immigration Reform聽(FAIR) and the John Birch Society, as Hatewatch reported in 2011.
Some extremists, such as Greg Johnson of the white nationalist site Counter-Currents, have used the site to supplement offline fundraising efforts. On Sept. 27, Johnson hosted a livestream on DLive with Jason Kessler, the organizer of the deadly 2017 鈥淯nite the Right鈥 rally in Charlottesville, which was promoted on Counter-Currents鈥 website as a fundraiser. Johnson also offered as an incentive that an anonymous donor intended to give a $5,000 matching grant 鈥 the maximum amount of money that can be donated by law to any nonprofit organization without reporting donor information to the IRS.
A new safe space for hate with no moderation
In her research, Squire identified DLive accounts that have used the emerging platform to spew hate without the interference of content moderation. 聽ostensibly forbid directly attacking people on the basis of immutable characteristics such as race or faith, but on any given night, many of the site鈥檚 content creators can be found using the platform to do exactly that.
Benjamin, DLive鈥檚 top earner, is reproducing the antisemitic material that caused YouTube, Twitter and other websites to remove him from their platforms. He has hosted figures such as E. Michael Jones, a septuagenarian author who traffics in antisemitic conspiracy theories and whose work has influenced . The 人兽性交 lists Jones鈥櫬Fidelity Press聽as a hate group. During an interview with Jones this spring, Benjamin said, 鈥淭he Holocaust narrative at this point is absurd.鈥
鈥淭hey鈥檙e turning people into decorative lamps? Like come on,鈥 he said, referring to 锘縜 war-borne myth about the Holocaust sometimes exploited by white supremacists and other antisemites as a way to mock the genocide of the Jewish people during World War II.
Benjamin continued, bemoaning how his statements targeting Jewish people were received at the time he was removed from mainstream platforms.
鈥淟ike my joke 鈥 鈥業 used to like Adolf Hitler until I learned he didn鈥檛 kill six million Jews.鈥 You know, just stupid jokes like that. They鈥檙e like, 鈥榊ou have to go away,鈥欌 he said.
In addition to his statement about his urge to engage in a 鈥淩oman salute,鈥 Fuentes has also repeatedly praised neo-Nazis and called for violence in response to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. On May 28, he said that such protesters 鈥渟hould be put in jail or killed鈥 if they engaged in looting. In the same stream, he invoked white supremacist tropes by claiming that Black people 鈥渄o not live in a civilized fashion鈥 and referring to the notion of 鈥淏lack dysfunction.鈥
In a more recent stream, aired in September, Fuentes called for the creators of the Netflix documentary 鈥淐uties鈥 to be killed. Far-right propagandists have targeted 鈥淐uties鈥 with a social media outrage campaign, alleging that the .
鈥淭hese people should be executed. Somebody has to be in jail for this. Somebody has to die for this,鈥 Fuentes said.
Celebrations of hate and calls for violence
DLive has a feature similar to YouTube鈥檚 鈥淪uper Chat,鈥 where viewers pay to directly engage with content creators during a live stream, while the site publishes what they write to them. The feature, since its inception on other sites, has been criticized for encouraging the 聽when left unmonitored.
Hatewatch also examined the chats of several extremists identified as top earners by Squire鈥檚 research and found that these chats included a wealth of racist and antisemitic content, as well as direct calls for violence. Users can also create their own virtual stickers on the platform, a privilege that has been used to spread the type of dehumanizing caricatures of Jewish and Black people found on white supremacist websites. The chats help demonstrate how DLive鈥檚 users are reacting to the content currently being aired on Wayn鈥檚 website.
鈥淲e seriously need to bring back public lynching in america 鈥 these animals need to be taught a lesson,鈥 wrote the user 鈥淩uschanGroyper鈥 in a chat attached to Fuentes鈥 DLive channel on Aug. 31.
Photo illustration by 人兽性交
