Thread by @raymserrato

THREAD: I've been living and working in Germany as a foreigner for six years and the far-right protests here have made me pretty uneasy, especially after I searched YouTube for videos about '#Chemnitz', which only led me down the Alt-Right rabbit hole.. 1/

2. You can use YouTube's API to grab videos related to a search term - in this case, just plain "Chemnitz." When I did that, I was able to retrieve 530 videos which were uploaded over the past 10 years, with more than 200 videos uploaded in the last week alone.

3. When I sorted these videos by view count, an unsettling trend emerged: most of the highly-viewed videos were from the perspective of the Alt-Right and its subgroups of conspirators, white nationalists, media like RT Deutsch, and other fringe right figures.

4. One video has almost half a million views. It wants to correct the "MSM" narrative about "no-go areas" caused by Nazis; the problem is actually migrants. (Interestingly, the video text was changed from DE to EN, presumably to reach a broader audience).

5. I also scraped comments from the top 12 videos (by comment count) to look at the words/phrases being used. Using a sample of words and phrases from the Nazi era, I found that around 8% of comments used such terms (words like lügenpresse, endlösung, altparteien, etc.).

6. Using these videos as seeds, I also retrieved all "related videos," which took me into the pit of the German Alt-Right, w/ vids like:
- Donald Trump - Das trojanische Pferd der Rothschilds
- Alice Weidel (AfD) über Kopftuchmädchen
- Flüchtlinge begrapschen Frauen im Freibad

7. YouTube as a "radicalizing instrument" is not new, and @zeynep - who you should definitely read - has talked about it a lot. But it's still unsettling to see how quickly you can get engulfed by extreme (and ignorant) views just by poking around YouTube for the latest news.