Influential YouTubers Pyrocynical and Keemstar promoted her early work, which ripped on YouTube culture and the indignities of being a fifth-grader instead of people of color and liberals. She didn’t start as a politics caster but, predictably, as a profane 9-year-old (9!) game streamer called LtCorbis. Interviews with Soph and asides in her videos reveal a young person whose identity is obviously still being formed. (Neither Soph nor her father responded to requests for comment.)
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That’s not to excuse anything Soph says but it is to say children often don’t understand the weight of the words they use. Part of being a young person, maybe especially for a rhetorically gifted one, is testing out ideas and identities - even ones we later find anathema. Today they’ve renounced racism and taken up marijuana legalization activism. Or think of Lynx and Lamb Gaede, who became media sensations as 11-year-old white nationalist twin pop singers in the mid-aughts. Today he’s a freelance journalist who writes about extremism for liberal magazines, and has disowned his past views. Think of Jonathan Krohn, the conservative child prodigy who addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2009, at age 13. And hearing this language lisped through braces, with the odd word mispronounced as if read but never before said, is clarifying. Despite the vitriol of her words and her confidence in delivering them, she’s still just a 14-year-old kid. (Soph is even more explicitly hateful on Discord, the gaming chat app, where she recently admitted to writing under the username “lutenant faggot” that she hoped for “A Hitler for Muslims” to “gas them all.”)īy now, we’re used to this stuff coming from grown men - some of whom have even used the platform as a launching pad for political aspirations. Of course, it’s all presented in the terminally ironic style popularized by boundary-pushing comedy groups like the influential Million Dollar Extreme and adopted of late by white supremacist mass shooters in Christchurch and San Diego. Soph’s scripts, which she says she writes with a collaborator, are familiar: a mix of hatred toward Muslims, anti-black racism, Byzantine fearmongering about pedophilia, tissue-thin incel evolutionary psychology, and reflexive misanthropy that could have been copied and pasted from a thousand different 4chan posts. The video platform for years has incentivized such content through algorithms favoring sensational videos, and, as recent reporting has revealed, has deliberately ignored toxic content as a growth strategy. (She edits as well as scores the videos, which she says are comedic.) Through videos like these, she’s become a rising star - with more than 800,000 followers - in the universe of conspiracy theorists, racists, and demagogues that owes its big bang to YouTube. This is what indoctrination looks like when it’s reflected back by the indoctrinated.Ī 20-minute, unbroken, and hyperarticulate tirade ostensibly about ignoring criticism online, “Be Not Afraid” stars a high school freshman from the Bay Area who goes by the name Soph on YouTube. But this video reveals an entirely different way the platform is harming kids: by letting them express extreme views in front of the entire world. Users - and more importantly to YouTube, advertisers - have over the past year started to hold the platform accountable for enabling the exploitation of children and exposing them to disturbing content. To understand just how bad things have gotten on the platform, you need to see it for yourself. The video is called “Be Not Afraid,” and it may be the clearest manifestation yet of the culture the executives of Alphabet’s video monster are delivering to millions of kids around the world, now via children incubated in that selfsame culture. Yes, if you want a vision of the future YouTube is midwifing, imagine a cherubic white girl mocking Islamic dress while lecturing her hundreds of thousands of followers about Muslim “rape gangs,” social justice “homos,” and the evils wrought by George Soros - under the thin guise of edgy internet comedy, forever.Īctually, don’t imagine it. Or how about, simply, “Kill yourself, faggot.” Of course, I get raped by my 40-year-old husband every so often and I have to worship a black cube to indirectly please an ancient Canaanite god - but at least I get to go to San Fran and stone the shit out of some gays, and the cops can’t do anything about it because California is a crypto-caliphate.” Suffice to say, I’ve been having a fuck ton of fun. How about this: “I’ve become a devout follower of the Prophet Muhammad.
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What does a 14-year-old girl dressed in a chador have to say on YouTube to amass more than 800,000 followers?