UMass Lowell professor explains how extremist ideologies spread on social media

Young people are growing up in a fast-changing online world. Over the past few years, people who use social media to spread their social and political agendas have gained significant traction with young audiences, including figures like neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, misogynist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate, and anti-feminist Hannah Pearl Davis. As these influencers' audiences have grown, so have concerns about their promotion of extremist ideologies. Arie Perliger, a professor at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at UMass Lowell, joined All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the spread of extremist messaging online. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: So, when did we start seeing the rise of figures like Andrew Tate? I feel like I first became aware maybe two or three years ago.

Arie Perliger: We see the emergence of these kind of ideological online communities — and I want to emphasize these are communities, because there's substantial interactions between the influencer and his followers, and between the followers themselves. So we're not talking about one-sided discourse. We're talking about real online communities that share their views, share their ideas, and share their perspectives. Of course, the influencer has a lot of influence and a lot of impact on directing the discourse to the areas that he wants to promote.

But those communities really started to emerge around the mid-2010s. It's not that online communities didn't exist before. But those kind of fiercely ideological online communities — which were led by highly influential figures who used very sophisticated rhetorical tools to build an ideological community — this is something that we really see just in the last decade or so.

Rath: It's interesting to hear you talk about these as communities, emphasizing that point, because I think that gets us to something important that it's hard to see from the outside. Take Andrew Tate as an example. His message is really one of looking out for you in a way.

Perliger: Yes. I think that one of the elements that makes these communities so popular — especially among young people and especially young males — is the fact that they really engage with them and address a lot of their perceived grievances or perceived challenges, whether these are those related to inabilities to develop romantic relationships or any kind of social relationships, whether these are difficulties in terms of thinking and planning their future, whether these are financial challenges and so on. So I think many of those communities emerged as some kind of a safe haven to a lot of young people who feel alienated from society, feel that in many cases they are being marginalized or just feel really frustrated because they're not able to make progress in their professional lives or interpersonal lives. They find within those communities some kind of emotional support, some kind of a social support that they feel helps them to feel a little bit better about their lives.

Now, it's important to emphasize that a lot of those communities also are promoting extremist narratives, whether these are extremist misogynist narratives, extremist xenophobic or racist narratives, and there's a lot of nuances and a lot of variation. But in general, I think it's important to understand that the reason people are being attracted to and are joining those communities — and we do see a dramatic increase in the size of those communities — is because they really fulfill emotional and social needs of many of those members.

Rath: As I mentioned, it's not just men who are engaging with this and being targeted, but women as well. I'd like to hear more about that, because I don't honestly know a lot about figures like H. Pearl Davis or the tradwife [traditional wife] concept. Could you talk about that?

Perliger: I think it's a really interesting development. We know that in the last decade or so, there was a dramatic expansion of misogynist, extremist online communities, whether those are incel [involuntary celibate] communities or other type of misogynist communities. Those communities developed a very nuanced and elaborated ideology, focusing on what they perceive as the ongoing oppression of men, the marginalization of men, of how feminism has undermined men's status in society and so on.

Now, part of this ideological narrative that is popular in those communities is also focusing on how much feminism and women empowerment, in their perception, has hurt women and how much women have to benefit from returning to embracing traditional gender roles.

And out of this, we see a new trend of what we can define as tradwives, and these are social media influencers that actually are operating in some of the more popular social media platforms, such as YouTube and Twitter and Instagram. They are promoting returning to what they perceive as the more natural, more compatible lifestyle for women, basically encouraging women to embrace traditional gender roles. That means focusing mainly on traditional values, traditional lifestyle. I think what makes this specific type of influencer so popular is that they are extremely sophisticated and very effective in instilling their views in a very subtle and a very non-threatening way. So, for example, they'll share a recipe for cookies or for food, or they'll give some kind of advice of house maintenance and so on. But through those seemingly non-threatening messages, they will consistently instill what they believe are the right values or the right role of women in society. So they do that in a very sophisticated, non-threatening way. However, the more you analyze and examine their messages, you see that in the subtext, a lot of misogynist perceptions and visions, but also in many cases, xenophobic and other far-right extremist views.

Rath: In terms of the role of the social media companies themselves, not even suggesting that they would take down this content, but they also promote content in different ways. We know that from the various algorithms that put things into your feed. Do we have a sense of how the sites benefit from the relationship with the influencers?

Perliger: I think that the sites are benefiting because those influencers are very effective in building communities, in attracting followers and encouraging people to use those platforms. So those platforms are very effective in monetizing those influencers' content. It's very effective for them because again, the more they can foster the expansion of those communities eventually that will translate to actual profits. Now there's an array of other challenges that we face, especially in the US. First of all, in the US, the protection on speech is much more substantial than in other Western countries, which puts a lot of limitation on the ability of online platforms to monitor or to take out this kind of content.

I think if we really want to think about how we can address this growing threat, I don't think removing content will eventually be the solution. First of all, because I think it's very difficult to define and effectively remove hate speech because of those protections that I just mentioned. But also because it's very difficult sometimes to define what is extremist content, what kind of content can foster violence or illegal activities, and so on.

I think our only effective path is thinking how we can create a generation of young people who can actually engage in critical evaluation of the content that they are consuming. We need to provide them the tools, the skill sets, to evaluate and to be critical about the content that they consume. Hopefully that will make them a little bit more durable, a little bit more resilient, when they encounter this kind of content.

Rath: That sounds smart. Thank you so much. This has been fascinating and deeply important.

Perliger: Thank you for having me.