In 2012, the Jordanian cartoonist Omar Abdallat won the ‘Cartoon Spring Competition’ an event organised by Radio Netherlands Worldwide and the Dutch comic festival Stripdagen Haarlem, which gave young Arab cartoonists an opportunity to share their perspective on the Arab Spring with a global audience. Abdallat’s cartoon ‘Tweet of Freedom’ which depicted a blue bird, not unlike the Twitter logo, escaping a cage shaped like a military general, was a clear reference to the power of social media.

The social web, in its heyday dubbed ‘Web 2.0’ in part grew from technologies developed to assist the anti-globalisation movement. Several early Twitter engineers were veterans of Indymedia, the open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that emerged after the 1999 Carnival Against Capital and Seattle World Trade Organisation protests. Indymedia was beginning to wane at the same time as its social media replacements were ascendant.

While the anti-globalisation left are seen as early adopters of the internet, with its ability for publishing without the gatekeepers of traditional forms of media, the far-right were there even earlier. ‘No platform for fascists’ has only come to be seen as a radical leftist demand in recent years, for most of post-WWII history ‘no platform for fascists’ was standard editorial policy for every mainstream media outlet. Fascists realised that the internet could give them the platform they were denied before most people knew what the internet was.

In July of 1985 the Washington Post reported that a ten year old boy in Pittsburgh had “sat down in his bedroom, connected his home computer to a telephone line and dialed another computer 150 miles away in West Virginia. Soon his terminal screen was filled with messages such as “The Case Against the Holocaust,” which asserted that the Holocaust of Jews in World War II was a hoax. Stormfront, which had begun as a bulletin board service in the pre-web era, was launched as a website in 1995 by the former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black, giving white supremacists the world over a discussion forum to meet and share hate with each other.

The early internet was pioneered by people who believed they were creating something amazing, a technology that would subvert the power of states and foster a post-industrial (possibly even post-capitalist) knowledge economy. Drawing on the shared anti-statism of the new left counterculture of the 1960s and 70s and the neoliberalism that became hegemonic in the 1980s and 90s, they created what media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed ‘The Californian Ideology’ in a 1995 essay of the same name. Barbrook and Cameron correctly noted the flaws in a worldview that advocated the free exchange of ideas in a depoliticised and dehistoricised virtual utopia.

“[T]hey want information technologies to be used to create a new ’Jeffersonian democracy’ where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace. However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery.”

While well received in some quarters, Gary Kamiya Kamiya of Salon claimed the essay was advancing a “ludicrous academic-Marxist claim that high-tech libertarianism somehow represents a recrudescence of racism.”

The teenage founder of the website 4chan (est. 2004) didn’t have lofty ideas about cyberspace utopias, but the Californian ideology was in the ether. The collection of anonymous discussion forums was very lightly moderated, with an ‘anything goes’ attitude. Dale Beran, in his 2019 book ‘It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office’ places the emergence of 4chan in the context of the worldview that emerged in the west following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time where a belief that capitalism would endure for the remainder of eternity was considered common sense, and previous countercultures were co-opted into marketing campaigns.

“As a result, countercultures hoping to resist co-optation in the 90s employed nihilism as a survival strategy. They became about nothing, about having no value system, leaving the house of their mind, morals, and desires empty so there was nothing to steal. And this numb indifference complemented a numb indifference to politics, a response to the so-called end of history.”

The subculture that developed on 4chan was a nihilistic race to the bottom, in Beran’s words “It became the place where people achieved new lows”. 4chan’s user base was made up of economically marginalised young men, who would often self identify as ‘NEETs’ from an acronym used by British statisticians for people not in education, employment or training. Withdrawing from the world into video games and other somewhat nerdy hobbies.

4chan spawned the hacktivist collective ‘Anonymous’ which initially targeted the Church of Scientology and played a role in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, a movement championing the cause of “the 99%” against the 1% of the people in the world who own the majority of its wealth. For a brief period it looked as if the young and economically disempowered, from the unemployed of North Africa to the ‘NEETs’ of North America were united in a cause. But it wouldn’t last long.

4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board /pol/ which was added to the site in 2011 “acted as a platform for far-right extremism” and “is notable for its widespread racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist, and anti-LGBT content.” According to a citation-laden paragraph on the Wikipedia article covering the board.

Following Stormfront and its predecessors, /pol/ provided another example of the bankruptcy of the Californian ideology. In her 2009 book Cyberracism, sociologist Jessie Daniels wrote: “empirical research increasingly demonstrates that people go online, even to text-only online spaces, not in search of some disembodied libertarian utopia but to engage in the construction and affirmation of embodied racial identities and these identities are in turn shaped by power relations.”

The young men who habitually used 4chan, whether /pol/ specifically or the sites other boards, in the years where the influence of Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous were declining, became radicalised into a new movement- the coordinated harassment of women in the video game industry and related fields such as games journalism. These disenfranchised men had sought refuge in escapism, and when feminist criticism and influence on game production began to flourish, they saw it as an encroachment on one of the few remaining masculine spaces.

“You can activate that army,” Steve Bannon told a biographer. Bannon, at the time of Gamergate was the chair of Breitbart News, a website he once described as “the platform for the alt-right”, he would later become Donald Trump’s senior advisor and chief White House strategist. He saw the potential of the army of angry young men. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

Following Trump’s election, it seemed the internet would further poison people’s minds. Qanon, a bizarre conspiracy theory postulating that Donald Trump was going to take down the ‘deep state’ apparatus- American institutions who were supposedly protecting an elite cabal who were harvesting a chemical called adrenochrome from kidnapped children- began on 4chan in 2017 with an anonymous poster claiming to be a government insider. The conspiracy later moved to 8chan, a clone of 4chan with even less moderation, but spread largely thanks to social media’s content recommendation algorithms, via influencers on mainstream sites like YouTube and Facebook. In 2018 Jessie Daniels described the rise of the alt-right as “both a continuation of a centuries-old dimension of racism in the U.S. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms.”

This is the case not just in the US, but the wider western world. While it was neither the first nor the last act of violence from the alt-right, the terror attack in Christchurch in 2019 hammered these points home. An atrocity committed by a man radicalised via 4chan and YouTube, who shared his manifesto on 8chan and live streamed his attack on Facebook.

The attack led to the Christchurch Call to Action Summit (more commonly referred to as simply ‘the Christchurch Call’) a political summit initiated by then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and held in Paris, France just two months after the mosque shootings. Co-chaired by Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron, the summit aimed to “bring together countries and tech companies in an attempt to bring to an end the ability to use social media to organise and promote terrorism and violent extremism”. 17 countries originally signed the non-binding agreement, notably absent was the United States under president Donald Trump (The US later joined the call under president Joe Biden). Eight major tech companies, as part of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) consortium, also signed the pledge. In May of 2024 the Christchurch Call was turned into a foundation, and is now supported by philanthropists and independent from any governments.

25 commitments were eventually adopted by 56 governments and 19 service providers. The online environment has changed somewhat; algorithms have been modified to reduce the spread of toxic narratives and there has been a much wider roll out of interventions for users at risk of radicalisation. However, challenges remain, such as what Christchurch Call director Paul Ash described as “severely degraded information systems” when speaking at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference in Christchurch in July.

Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk and renamed “X” had long been a haven for fake news, but under Musk the degradation has accelerated. “Few recent actions have done more to make a social media platform safe for disinformation, extremism, and authoritarian regime propaganda than the changes to Twitter since its purchase by Elon Musk in 2022” wrote Miah Hammond-Errey, the director of the Emerging Technology Program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in 2023.

Musk welcomed back users banned from the platform following the January 6 insurrection, and regularly engages with the European far-right, including figures linked to the Christchurch shooter. He has given credence to conspiratorial ideas including the ‘Great Replacement’ narrative. Any hopes that the “free speech absolutism” professed by Musk in 2022 would benefit the left equally have been dashed. In addition to studies showing the platform is now more popular with the right, Musk has made clear his idea of free speech is not really absolute at all. He has described the term “cisgender” as a slur, and limited the visibility of posts that use it. He has also stated that the slogan “from the river to the sea” and the term “decolonization” are in fact “Clear calls for extreme violence” the use of which “will result in suspension.” Twitter, or X as Musk insists it be called, now feels a world away from the time when Omar Abdallat drew ‘Tweet of Freedom.’

What now, for “digital antifascism?”. Alternatives to Twitter exist, Mastodon, with its system of decentralised, federated instances appears to be, at least in theory, an ideal model. However, less tech savvy users have struggled to make sense of the platform and established norms on some instances have made new users feel unwelcome. Bluesky, which uses similar architecture to Mastodon but is considered more user friendly, has been adopted more widely. These platforms are niche though, with 1.8 and 5.9 million users respectively, compared to Twitter’s half a billion (or the massive 3.9 billion users of Meta’s platforms). Joining these sites can feel like the online equivalent of abandoning a crumbling society to establish a commune in the countryside. But with that in mind, the significance of Anonymous, Gamergate and Qanon show influential movements can start in niche spaces. We’ve just seen a lot more reactionary ones than progressive ones so far.

While economically marginalised (predominantly young and white) men have been recruited into supporting the far-right (think Bannon’s “army”) other groups, marginalised in ways beyond just economic, are often organising themselves. Even the people who could potentially be drawn into reactionary movements seem to be open to a genuine left-wing alternative when it’s available. With polling showing a real risk of the far-right Rassemblement National coming to power in France this year, several parties on the French left formed the Nouveau Front Populaire (the name a reference to the Front Populaire of the interwar era). The NFP ran on a platform of increasing public sector salaries and welfare benefits, raising the minimum wage by 14 percent, and freezing the price of basic food items and electricity. The programme would be funded by reintroducing a wealth tax, cancelling a number of tax breaks for the wealthy, and raising income tax on the highest earners.

The NFP drew support from France’s minority ethnic groups, and creative forms of politics were practised. Members of the Front Électronique, made up of artists, DJs and promoters in the music industry, organised live debates on the video streaming service Twitch, as well as free concerts, and released a fund-raising album Siamo Tutti Antifascisti Vol.1 (We are all Anti-Fascists) which they described as a “call to arms”. The group’s 1,200 members include musicians Le Kaiju and Sujigashira of Grand Replacement Records, a collective which supports artists from diasporas of the global south, its name a play on the xenophobic conspiracy promoted by the fascist right.

The success of the left-wing alliance was beyond expectations; they now make up the largest party in parliament. The Rassemblement National is the third. While ideally they wouldn’t be represented at all, we now have a very recent historical example of a principled left-wing movement warding off the rise of fascism. Perhaps, if the NFP programme is implemented, the far-right will have less success convincing voters that the problem is immigrants, LGBTQIA+ communities, or a vague idea of “wokeness”.

In addition to building a genuine left-wing alternative, “No platform for fascists” remains a reasonable goal. Even free speech absolutists should be able to concede that the right to free speech does not mean the right to have that speech algorithmically promoted to an audience who would not otherwise seek it out. Meta, whose own internal research found users joining extremist groups on Facebook had those groups recommended to them by the algorithm, now limits the reach of all political content- an approach that arguably makes Meta platforms less useful for any political organising online. Twitter/X is increasingly a platform for Elon Musk to promote his own conspiratorial world view, and attempting to take that platform back from the far-right’s influence is likely a lost cause with him at the helm.

YouTube, owned by parent company Alphabet, appears to have fixed its algorithmic radicalisation problem, if not it’s wider extremism problem. The solution could lie with increasing the power of workers in the social media industry. In a statement released by the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), part of the Communications Workers of America, following the violence on January 6 2021 read:

“Workers at Alphabet have previously organized against the company’s continued refusal to take meaningful action to remove hate, harassment, discrimination, and radicalization from YouTube and other Alphabet-operated platforms, to no avail. We warned our executives about this danger, only to be ignored or given token concessions, and the results have been suicides, mass murders, violence around the world, and now an attempted coup at the Capitol of the United States.”

Supporting the concept of no platform for fascists means supporting the right of workers to refuse to build and maintain platforms for fascists.The owners of these platforms have shown themselves reluctant to stop their use by the far-right, or to even, in the case of Twitter, outright encourage it. The statement from Alphabet workers goes on to say “YouTube must no longer be a tool of fascist recruitment and oppression. Anything less is to countenance deadly violence: from Gamergate to Charlottesville, from Christchurch to Washington, D.C.”

The utopian dreams of the early internet were misguided, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be something better than the perpetual fascism machine it sometimes looks like today. Another vision of the future exists; not the future dreamt of by adherents of the Californian Ideology, but the one we have caught glimpses of, shaped by the North African protesters of 2011, the progressive hacktivists of Anonymous, the artists of le Front Électronique, and the labour militancy of the AWU. A better internet is possible, because after all, the internet is real life.

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Byron Clark

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