David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, frequently posts videos on a website called Odysee. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also streams his podcast, “The Alex Jones Show,” on the site. It works a lot like YouTube and attracts millions of views each month.
Anti-hate groups say the site is a hotbed of extremism where users from around the world — including promoters of U.S.-designated terrorist group the Nordic Resistance Movement, Holocaust deniers and Proud Boys supporters — use Odysee’s data storage and financial features to spread their views and raise money. Users also take advantage of the forum’s near complete lack of content moderation. The site’s CEO said he’s dedicated to keeping the company “censorship resistant.”
The site also comes with strong New England ties. Odysee was created by a now-defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and began with seed money from a downtown Boston-based venture capital firm called Pillar VC, financed by a diverse constellation of local investors.
Now several anti-hate groups and a local ethicist say those original investors could have or should have known about the site’s risks to public safety.
Those questions come at a time that advocates and law enforcement increasingly are asking questions about the responsibilities of loosely moderated sites to cull problematic content. And they worry its continued presence is contributing to political violence around the globe.
Richard Spinello, a professor of ethics and management at Boston College, told GBH News last week that federal laws generally protect websites from legal liability related to content on their sites. But he said even investors in Odysee are complicit in online content he found to be “scary” and “disturbing.”
“Anybody that’s associated with this in any way is morally tainted by it,” he said. “If you’re going to invest money and do due diligence, I think you have to look at what you’re investing in and whether or not the company or project you’re investing in is morally responsible.”
“They want a place that’s not going to tell them they’re not allowed to say hateful, terroristic, illegal things.’’Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at Southern Poverty Law Center
Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report identifying 165 “extremist channels” that publicly shared more than 50,000 videos on the Odysee website between 2021 and 2023. The report found 113 of the channels earned “tip”-style donations during that period, amounting to $336,000.
Megan Squire, co-author of the report and the center’s deputy director for data analytics, told GBH News that platforms that market themselves as having “free speech” or “uncensorable” features almost always cater to far-right extremists. Odysee stands out because it’s one of a few alt-tech sites similar to YouTube, she said.
“They want a place that’s not going to tell them they’re not allowed to say hateful, terroristic, illegal things,’’ she said. “Odysee plays that role and that’s a problem.”
Signs of how the website has been embraced by extremists are numerous.
LBRY Vice President Julian Chandra, now Odysee’s CEO, once defended the presence of neo-Nazis on the site, an incident first reported by the Guardian in 2021.
Creators that provide information for making 3D-printed guns are easily available on the platform.
Jytte Klausen, a professor at Brandeis University who studies hate groups and reviewed the site on request of GBH News, said she was amazed to see people on Odysee talking months ago about immigrants eating animals — an issue that later ended up in mainstream discourse.
“These rumor mills are intended to start a sort of paranoia and a distrust in authority,’’ she said. “We are watching these types of programmatic disinformation narratives spread in a very decentralized way across the internet and translate into the real world through politicians picking up things like Haitians eating cats and ducks and people’s pets.”
The site uses blockchain technology, which organizes data into blocks that are linked together in a secure, chronological chain and stored across a decentralized network of computers. This ensures the integrity and transparency of the information.
Mark Dwyer, an extremism funding investigator at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said that in addition to allowing hate groups to recruit and spread their views, Odysee’s tipping feature allows the groups to raise money even after they’ve been banned by the American banking system.
“At the end of the day, cryptocurrency is a somewhat easy transfer of funds, there’s no middleman,” Dwyer said. “Right now, what they’re using it for is soliciting donations. Especially if they have been deplatformed, or they’re going through a cycle of deplatforming with different payment processors and different crowdfunding platforms.”
Klausen agreed that fundraising aspect of Odysee is a draw for some users.
“This is how the real extremists can raise money for their business,” she said. “And they are making a lot of money.”
Early support from Boston investors
Pillar VC is a Boston-based venture capital firm created in 2016 by a group of investors, led by local entrepreneur Jamie Goldstein, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, according to his LinkedIn page.
Among Pillar’s cofounders are some of Boston’s most successful business leaders: Steve Kaufer, the cofounder of TripAdvisor; Gail Goodman, the founding CEO of the database site Constant Contact; and Chad Laurans, cofounder of the home security company SimpliSafe.
None of these co-founders could be reached for comment through their companies. It’s unclear if Pillar VC has any connection with Odysee at this time. But a review of court records and interviews by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting show how Pillar leaders worked with Odysee founders to create what now appears to be a thriving website for the alt-right.
One of the venture capital firm’s first investments was $300,000 provided to the cryptocurrency business LBRY, Odysee’s parent company, according to a company audit submitted as an exhibit in a federal court case later filed against LBRY.
In 2016, LBRY posted a press release announcing that Pillar — with that money — was leading a $500,000 fundraising round that helped build the infrastructure that led to Odysee. “Pillar VC is operated by determined visionaries who conducted careful due diligence in funding LBRY,” the press release said.
LBRY was created by New Hampshire–based entrepreneur and Libertarian politician Jeremy Kauffman on July 4, 2016.
GBH News could not reach Odysee’s current leadership for comment on this story. Kauffman responded with a one-line email comment last week.
“Every so-called journalist at GBH Boston is as evil as a reporter for Pravda, and a proper society would deport, jail, or execute them,” he wrote.
Kauffman has been criticized for now deleted tweets about murdering trans people. He is also a leader of the Mises Caucus, a national group of Libertarians who the Southern Poverty Law Center says are colluding with far-right leaders to gain political power nationwide.
“High-profile MC members espouse hateful rhetoric and collaborate with white nationalists,’’ the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in a 2022 blog post.
Kauffman most recently made headlines
after being connected to a New Hampshire Libertarian Party online post, saying, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” Kauffman
posted a video on X showing how he berated federal authorities who came to his house to ask about the post, while claiming nothing unlawful had occurred.
More details arise in federal court
Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers filed a case against LBRY in 2021, arguing that cryptocurrency traded on LBRY should have been registered with the federal government.
In a deposition for the SEC case, Pillar founder Goldstein said he and Pillar Managing Partner Sarah Hodges spent significant time personally working on LBRY.
“Sarah and I spent a lot of time with the company in that first year,” Goldstein said in the 2022 deposition. “At one point, we went to Jeremy and said, ‘We are spending a tremendous amount of our time here. It’s the most valuable thing we have. We only own 6% of your company. That doesn’t feel like enough to us. We would like to own more. We’d like more upside.’”
He told federal interviewers that he eventually accepted cryptocurrency traded on the site as added remuneration.
Neither Goldstein nor Hodges returned GBH News’ emails seeking comment.
It’s unclear if the companies are still connected. But some say Pillar and its founders should have known about Kauffman’s plan to market Odysee as an alt-tech site or, at the very least, seen evidence of what it has become.
One document entered as evidence in the federal court case shows Kauffman’s talking points for his pitch to investors. It includes several references to wanting to build an uncensorable website that does not have content moderation, and claims that YouTube has too much say in what people can post online.
In his business plan for LBRY, Kauffman said he would “leave the creators and users in charge, not us.” He said the company’s growth plan includes finding a way to recruit users from YouTube, progressing “from niche or otherwise outside the mainstream content’’ to more mainstream.
If his company were successful, Kauffman wrote, it would be “worth rather absurd sums of money.”
LBRY shuts down, but Odysee lives on
Kauffman’s company LBRY shut its doors in 2023 after a federal judge ruled in favor of the SEC. But despite LBRY’s closure, Odysee has thrived. More than 40 million visits were recorded at the site between April 2024 and June 2024, according to SimilarWeb, a company that monitors online traffic.
In June, Sam Williams, the founder of another blockchain platform called Arweave and its parent company, Forward Research, announced that he had acquired Odysee. Representatives for Williams did not respond to a request for an interview.
“The Arweave protocol will be the home for what social media should have always been: An open space for free exchange of ideas where users have immutable, guaranteed rights,” he said in a written statement announcing the acquisition.
In July, Julian Chandra, Odyssey’s CEO, announced plans for the company’s expansion in a blog post. Chandra wrote that his vision includes designing a new version of the site that will make it virtually impossible to remove Odysee-hosted content from the internet.
“We envision the new Odysee to be the same Odysee you’ve come to love but with more creator-centric features and is fully decentralized,’’ he wrote. That decentralization piece, he said, will make “Odysee and its creators truly special and unstoppable.”
This story was launched in an investigative journalism class at Harvard Extension School taught by Interim Investigations Editor Jenifer McKim. Tim Biba is currently enrolled in the program. GBH News intern Camille Bugayong contributed to this story.
