NYT: 8/9/17

A couple of recent NYT stories include “The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley”:

For alt-right activists, who occupy the rightmost flanks of a powerful conservative internet subculture, Google’s response to Mr. Damore’s memo was low-hanging fruit for mockery. But there is another reason that the alt-right’s opposition campaign appeared so quickly, with such well-practiced maneuvers.

For the last several months, far-right activists have mounted an aggressive political campaign against some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players. Extending their attacks beyond social networks like Facebook and Twitter, tech’s typical free-speech battlegrounds, they have accused a long list of companies, including Airbnb, PayPal and Patreon, of censoring right-wing views, and have pledged to expose Silicon Valley for what they say is a pervasive, industrywide liberal bias.

Complaints like these might once have been easily dismissed. But in the Trump era, as the right wing’s internet warriors have refined their tactics and gained legitimate political influence, they are putting Silicon Valley in an uncomfortable position.

Another piece, titled “For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio”, mentions vloggers Paul Joseph Watson, Stefan Molyneaux, Lauren Southern, and Stephen Crowder:

There are countless other forms of political expression on YouTube, but no bloc is anywhere near as organized or as assertive as the YouTube right and its dozens of obdurate vloggers. Nor is there a coherent group on the platform articulating any sort of direct answer to this budding form of reaction — which both validates this material in the eyes of its creators and gives it room to breathe, grow and assert itself beyond its immediate vicinity.

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