Far-right supporters move to open source to evade censorship
On 8 December last year, a Frenchman called Laurent Bachelier gave away a total of 28.5 bitcoins – worth $556,000 – to 22 people. On the same day, he killed himself.
In suicide notes written in French and English, he explained that the burden of illness (he suffered from a neurological pain disorder) and his loss of hope for the future had led him to despair. After railing against the decline of western civilization and attacks on free speech, he wrote that he had decided to “leave his modest wealth to certain causes and people”.
Allusions to the “14 words” slogan used by white supremacists offered a clue as to the causes he favored. The beneficiaries of Bachelier’s largesse were all either prominent far-right agitators, or platforms offering them a home. The donations immediately attracted the attention of cybersecurity researchers, extremism watchers and law enforcement officers.
Bachelier gave the video platform BitChute two bitcoins (in January, the price of a single bitcoin ranged between $30,000 and $40,000). The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer got one, the French Holocaust denier Vincent Reynouard got 1.5, and the US white nationalist celebrity Nick Fuentes, an attendee of the riots in Charlottesville and the rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol in Washington, received 13.5 – worth over $450,000.
A Guardian investigation can now reveal that one of the lesser-known beneficiaries is a YouTube influencer of sorts – one with a history of promoting far-right political ideology. Luke Smith, now a Florida resident, maintains a monetized YouTube channel with 109,000 subscribers. He received at least one bitcoin from Bachelier, valued at the time of writing at just over $30,000.
It’s possible that Bachelier saw in Luke Smith a like mind and a shared purpose. Beyond their common ground in far-right politics, each saw technology as a weapon in their war against liberal, tolerant societies.
Like Bachelier, Smith eschews socalled proprietary software – like MacOS or Microsoft Word – and communications tools like Facebook or Twitter, built and controlled by Silicon Valley firms. Instead, Smith is an advocate for so-called “open source software” – the kind that makes it possible to use, copy, redistribute and modify software legally. And recently, he has been promoting communications platforms that might help extremists to operate beyond the reach of censorship – and even the law.
What Smith preaches: a war against the modern world
The man being funded by Bachelier’s donation likes to present himself as a latter-day Ted Kaczynski – the so-called Unabomber, whose infamous manifesto Smith has at times earnestly recommended to his followers.
Kaczynski, a terrorist still imprisoned for a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three and injured 23, was motivated by a hatred of the modern technological world. In recent years, his apocalyptic account of an industrial civilization on the brink of collapse has resonated with rightwing extremists – including the Christchurch mosque murderer, Brenton Tarrant – who describe themselves as “eco-fascists”.
In 2019, Smith said in a video he wanted to live in a “Unabomber cabin” to escape the surveillance and censorship which he believes is especially aimed at the far right. In a post on his blog in the same year – since deleted – he described the modern world as one “where your every action is watched, if you use proprietary software and communicate only via social media services”.
Public records show that Smith moved to a rural property that year near Mayo, in northern Florida, whose title is held by a family member. Since then, most of his videos have been recorded in and around the property.
In various videos and podcasts, Smith rehearses other ideas associated with the far right. He advocates breaking the US up – potentially into racial enclaves “maybe [by] dividing by states, maybe [by] dividing by ethnic groups”. The fantasy of the US splintering along ethnic lines has long been entertained by white nationalists, who have taken to calling themselves the “Balk Right”.
This is not the only place where Smith touches on ideas associated with white nationalism. In a 2018 podcast, he offers an account of human history that relies on arguments made in The 10,000 Year Explosion, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist book. Smith also directed readers to websites like radishmag, where readers are asked to “reconsider” slavery and lynching is painted in a positive light.
Luke Smith did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Taken together, these beliefs come back to another far-right splinter ideology: the neoreactionary movement, which in the last decade has been enjoying an online renaissance of sorts, especially among some of Silicon Valley’s tech elite.
The birth of the neoreactionary movement
The neoreactionary movement traces its history to 2007, when the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin started a popular blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He used it to attack liberalism, democracy and equality, discussed racial hierarchy in the euphemistic terms of “human biodiversity”, and counseled followers to simply detach themselves from the society ruled by the institutions of liberalism.
Journalist Corey Pein wrote an account of the culture of Silicon Valley which, in part, examines the influence that Yarvin’s ideas had in the tech world. Pein says that while neoreactionary ideology is somewhat incoherent, what is consistent is the members’ commitment to extricate themselves from liberal democracy. This “exit” doctrine was influential among some Silicon Valley leaders, including the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who once memorably said: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Smith follows the same ideological path. His principal outlet for these ideas is his YouTube channel, where he offers tutorials on how to use austere open source software applications, encouraging viewers to detach themselves from Silicon Valley’s products. The channel is both relatively successful and lucrative, and followers rate him highly. His videos have had more than 18.7m views, meaning he could earn anywhere up to $31,100 a year from his channel on current numbers.
YouTube confirmed that Smith’s channel remained in their partner program, meaning that he continues to earn money from the channel, but that they had removed one video, featuring racial slurs, which the Guardian had
asked about.
Media representatives for Google responded to requests for comment with theirown request for clarification of questions about Smith’s channel andtheir community guidelines, but ultimately offered no comment.
Smith has lately been pushing users in the direction of decentralized, resilient social media platforms in the so-called “fediverse”, a network of independent social media sites that communicate with one another, and allow people to interact across different sites. This could allow far-right activists to operate in ways that make them very difficult to shut down.
Though many prominent programmers and advocates in both the wider open source software movement and the fediverse are motivated by progressive, anti-corporate or anti-authoritarian political ideals, now the tools they have created might be used to shelter far-right extremists from the consequences of their hate speech and organizing.
Manipulating the open source movement for nefarious ends
The free and open source software movement has attracted many people with progressive politics, who have used it to help provide digital tools to those with few resources, to breathe new life into hardware that might otherwise have been added to a growing mountain of e-waste, or to move public institutions from Barcelona to Brasília away from dependence on expensive software.
However, experts say that it is not surprising that someone like Smith would be tolerated or even welcomed by some elements of open source culture.
Megan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University who has published research on both the far right and open source software communities. She says that “the dominant open source culture historically has been one of extreme misogyny, unfounded meritocracy, toxicity and abuse of everyone,” and that Smith is one of those resisting efforts to change that culture.
In recent years, and especially since the Gamergate movement intensified scrutiny on toxicity in tech, some responded to the blatant sexism, antisemitism and racism online with codes of conduct after realizing this behavior was actually starting to hurt them (Squires says they couldn’t recruit and retain developers).
The provision of safer online spaces for marginalized groups is a large part of the motivation of many of the people who have created the underlying software. On those platforms, tools for moderation and easy ways to flag sensitive content are baked in by design. But Smith is among a small group who repeatedly rail against the introduction of such codes of conduct within open source projects.
In a video recorded a week after the Capitol riots, when social media bans were removing rightwingers from Donald Trump down to prevent further violence, Smith said that those who wanted to bypass censorship should use the Twitter-like platform, Pleroma.
Open source software like Pleroma, Mastodon and Matrix reproduce the functions of Twitter, allowing users to send out brief messages to followers. But their implementation and structure are much more decentralized, allowing anyone to set up their own platform on their own server, after which they can join up, or “federate”, with other such communities.
Some open source communications platforms go a step beyond this, and do away with the need for servers altogether by implementing a “peer-topeer” network. PeerTube, for example, allows users to browse and watch videos in a similar way to YouTube, but instead of streaming it to users from a central server, each user watching a video acts as a relay point.
The technical details are perhaps less important than the practical effect: no one has authority over these platforms: no one owns them. While governments and users can place pressure on the big social media companies to ban problematic users or communities, for better or worse, no one can stop anyone creating their own servers or peer-to-peer networks.
These technologies, then, are effectively uncensorable. According to a report by Emmi Bevensee, the cofounder of research consultancy Rebellious Data and the social media monitoring tool SMAT, extremists have been advocating, and even developing them, for years.
“Every marginalized community knows what it’s like to be systematically deplatformed”, says Bevensee, who uses non-binary pronouns, pointing to the way in which groups such as sex workers have adopted platforms like Mastodon after finding themselves unable to advertise their services.
But as Bevensee’s report shows, peer-to-peer platforms are a doubleedged sword. “The reason I want it as a trans anti-fascist is the same reason that a Nazi wants it; we just have opposite ends,” they explain.
“You know who really doesn’t understand it? The FBI,” Bevensee adds: “we’re talking about a technology that can’t be subpoenaed. It can’t be surveiled” and, in order to carry out remote surveillance of private chats, “you would have to back door every single device in the world”.
This opens the way for extremists to propagandize and organize on platforms that are beyond the reach of legal authorities and tech giants alike. After the far right-friendly social media site Gab encountered hosting problems and app store bans, it rebuilt itself on Mastodon’s software, despite determined opposition from the platform’s creators and users.
Beyond Gab’s ambiguous place in the fediverse, the Guardian found dozens of servers using peer-to-peer, open source tools, which were either exclusively or disproportionately devoted either to far-right politics, or to conspiracy theories that mainstream social media services have previously cracked down on, including coronavirus denialism, “incel” culture and neo-Nazism.
With the far right under pressure from mainstream social media companies and internet hosts, this may be just the beginning.
But experts say that despite their recurrent complaints about Silicon Valley’s platforms, extremists will maintain their foothold in the mainstream for as long as they can. As Squire says of Smith’s internet activity: “Why is he still on YouTube? Because that’s where the eyeballs are, that’s where the money is.”
• In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
The fantasy of the US splintering along ethnic lines has long been entertained by white nationalists