Far Right Women Influencers on YouTube and Instagram, with Dr. Eviane Leidig

[MUSIC] Hey everybody, welcome to the social media and politics podcast. Bringing you expert insights into how social media is changing the political game. [MUSIC] I'm your host, Michael Bacetta, assistant professor of communication and media at Lund University. [MUSIC] You can follow the show on X at SMNP podcast or visit us on the web at socialmediaandpolitics.org. [MUSIC] All right y'all, thanks so much for tuning in. Over the course of this podcast series, we've looked at how various influencers are used in election campaigns to support a particular candidate party or cause. And we're going to keep doing that as the 2024 election unfolds. But in this episode, we're going to be focusing on how influencers and in particular, women influencers can push a more meta-political agenda, meaning not so much focused on a particular candidate or a party, but more at an ideological level, trying to change broader moral, social, and cultural values. And my guest to discuss this is Dr. Evian Leidig. She is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies at Tillberg University. And last year published the book The Women of the Far Right. Social media influencers and online radicalization, published by Columbia University Press. And so we'll dive into that book in this episode. And in particular, Dr. Leidig's digital ethnographic research, following about a dozen prominent women influencers that were associated with the alt-right movement around the time of Donald Trump's presidency. And even if you follow American politics closely, these are influencers that you may not be particularly familiar with. People like Lana Lackteth, Lauren Chen, and Robin Riley. And while you may have heard of Milo Yiannopoulos, or Stephen Crowder, or Ben Shapiro, these are sort of the women counterpart of that far right movement. And what Dr. Leidig did is immerse herself in the various presences that these influencers had on platforms like YouTube and Instagram to find out what was going on there in terms of how these influencers were creating intimacy and relationships with their audiences. And to me, what sticks out with these women influencers is that different from their male counterparts. They really work in more lifestyle content around things that we associate with the tradwife movement, for example. So the sort of domestic labor around cooking and parenting sort of blends in with moral and political values in a way that is unique to these women influencers. And so we'll dive into that in this episode. And in particular, how mainstream platforms like YouTube and Instagram through this type of women-focused lifestyle content can carry these very imbued messages around cultural moral and political values. So a fascinating study, a fascinating topic, and without further ado, let me turn it over to Dr. Evian Leidig. Again, she is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies at Tilburg University. Dr. Leidig, thanks so much for taking the time out and welcome to the social media and politics podcast. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So before we dive into the social media strategies of these influencers, why don't we start out with a bit of background context to your research project. You set out to study far-right women influencers for three years at the height of the alt-right movement, which you stress is a movement within a broader far-right ideology. So could you describe this distinction for us between alt-right and far-right, and how social media was particularly important for the alt-right to emerge? Yeah, so I started writing this book in 2019, around the decline of the so-called alt-right. So for context, when I think about the alt-right and the way that I situate it within the book, is I attribute it to a specific time and place. So for me, the alt-right was at that moment in time the most contemporary manifestation of far-right politics in North America, which really started around 2015, 2016, and then kind of fizzled out by the end of Trump's presidency. It was a movement that really surfaced through online technologies. So when I write about the emergence of the alt-right, I say that it's also a story just as much as trying to understand the rapid rise of social media use. So it was a arguably leaderless movement. There wasn't a very clear ideology, although if you look closely at what some of the primary ideas were within the alt-right, it derived from what is the legacy of far-right ideology, namely, nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. And it was a movement that did tend to fracture out of North America. We definitely saw some connections transcendentically to the UK and Europe, and someone argued to Australia. But I think it's really important to situate it as a specific time and place. Now, when I first started off writing this book, I had decided to just call this a book about the alt-right. And then some colleagues in this space who I was discussing the book idea with, they were like, "Well, it actually is just about the far-right, but while you're looking at it, it's just a very specific narrow or lens of the far-right." Right. And you describe the agenda of these influencers as "metapolitical," meaning that they aim to change social and cultural values. So could you outline this argument about their agenda being "metapolitical"? But then what about formal politics? Did they get behind certain candidates and parties? I mean, this is around the time of Donald Trump, but was there support for formal politics also evident in their content? That's a great question. And I think this is something that perhaps was an early indicator when I started looking into the alt-right as a movement, which was, yes, indeed, it could sort of coalesce with the rise of the Trump election in presidency. So obviously, there was a vested interest in terms of what was happening within the GOP. But my main argument within the book and perhaps what has allowed for the alt-right to sort of linger as a movement was this very strong focus on "metapolitical activism." So by that, I mean that these influencers, as well as sort of other alt-right political activists, they weren't so concerned about getting votes at the ballot box. Yes, it was important that Trump got elected, but for these activists, they were much more concerned about a long-term political strategy. By that, I mean that they were really focused on trying to shape public consciousness around certain social and cultural issues, whether that be themes like anti-feminism and traditional gender rules, or more broadly, things like anti-immigration politics, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic ideas, these sorts of attitudes that they were really trying to help push at a cultural and social level. So, indeed, they were still very politically oriented, but perhaps politics with a lower KSP. And would you say that that "metapolitical agenda" is something specific to the alt-right, or is that something also that captures the far right as well? Because I think perhaps the far right does have a bit more connection to formal party politics than at least what I think of when I think of the alt-right. Yeah, I mean, I think we talk about the far right, you know, we have to remember it is a really broad spectrum, right? So, it could be themes like political parties, particularly in Europe, but also social movements, some cultural organizations. I mean, it's such a vast landscape. On the one hand, I think, for many of these influencers, they were connected to actually established social movements organizations. So, I write in the book about how some of them are connected to the identitarian movements within Europe, which does try to sort of mobilize on issues towards the ballot box. Whereas, you know, some are loosely connected to, say, the Republican Party in the US, but there are kind of more figures that you'll see operating within, like, the turning point, milieu, or sort of trying to be more active and say, like, young conservative politics. But at least as far as I would assess them, you know, they're not the people who I would see, say, running for political office or within parties. With the exception of maybe a couple of influencers I studied who are based in Europe, where it's a much more feasible option or avenue, I would say, towards impact with their activism. Yeah, definitely. That's maybe that's why the far right connotation kind of comes more from a, at least in my mind, from a formal politics angle because of this European focus on multi-parties and the right wing of it. But could you give us a bit of an overview into the types of influencers you were actually following as kind of the personal manifestations of this movement? And in terms of the content or format that they were communicating, were there certain similarities across these influencers, or did they typically try to differentiate their content to try to carve out particular niches? Yeah, so there's a select group of influencers that I first selected when I was thinking about, you know, who I wanted to research for this book. Now, just bear in mind that when I started writing this book, When people thought about what the alt-right looked like, there was this very stereotypical image about, you know, young, angry men. So I knew, for instance, that there were quite prominent women who were, say, influencers within this space, but they just didn't have as much attention or they just weren't being taken as seriously as their male counterparts. So I started off by looking at Becca Lewis's reports for data and society in what she calls the alternative influence network. So this was a network of what she calls reactionary right YouTubers. I would say what they was about the same as the alt-right in terms of what she had mapped out. And within that map, she identified a number of prominent women who were part of that alternative influence network. That's sort of the core group of women that I had started off researching. So these are figures like Lauren Southern, Brittany Petty-Bone, Ozelner, Rebecca Hargraves, Lauren Chen, Lana Locktiff. So I started off with them. They had the most prominent YouTube follow-ins. And then I kind of snowballed from there, getting a sense of who they would have on their channels to interview or to have YouTube collapse. Where else were they appearing within this sort of alt media landscape. As I was writing this book, also there were a couple of new women who had sort of popped onto the scene who started to get very popular within this YouTube far right ecosystem. So I decided to include them as well. In total, there's like about a dozen women that I ended up following some feature more prominently than others. But I sort of show how they're all kind of connected into this network. And most of them are based in North America. That is the US and Canada. But now they also have connections to Europe, Australia and South Africa. What is interesting is at least for most of these women when they sort of start off their political careers in this space, they do so as commentators on YouTube. So sort of reacting to current events or to political developments. But they also almost all focus on an opposition to feminism, which they use their gender as a form of authority and credibility. So because they are women and because they're speaking out against feminism, it is seen as a sort of legitimate avenue for them to fall right into this political space and to get attention within this network. So definitely a lot of shared aspects around opposition to feminism, but then also opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, as well as for maybe those on the bit more of extreme end explicit anti-Semitism, as well as over time, I've seen them delve into various conspiracy theories. So first it was a little bit of QAnon, then during the pandemic, it was a lot of conspiracy theories around masking lockdowns and then vaccinations, sort of how they all tie that all together with their fall right ideas and beliefs. But they also definitely tried to differentiate their content in slightly different ways. So for instance, like I noticed during the pandemic, a couple of influencers were very drawn towards rallying around disinformation about the vaccine and sort of tying that into conversations about health and wellness, as well as parenting and being mothers. So I definitely saw how they were starting to dwell into what I would argue is various lifestyle content, in which they were starting to fuse their fall right political ideas into that lifestyle content. And I mean, I know that you were following these influencers across different different platforms, and I want to get into those platform differences or similarities a bit more granularly in just a second, but you also mentioned how over the course of your research, some new influencers popped up, they're also collaborating with each other, and I'm just curious about how they would or not stake out particular issues. And at some point that, for example, Lana Loughtep was able to early on kind of make this bridge between the manosphere and women supported misogyny. The way that I read it was that it's sort of staking out that issue. So do you think there was a type of issue ownership going on, whether that's for explicitly political issues or also carving out niches, and as you said, like health and lifestyle type of topics. So you're right in the sense that, you know, for some of these influencers, I think to stand out, I mean, we have to remember that this space, it's very competitive, that is, you know, there's always, you know, influencers trying to solicit more attention from others trying to get more followers likes, etc. So there is an aspect of issue ownership, but I mean, despite that, I do think that there is quite a lot of convergence around certain ideas within the far right, namely things like traditional gender roles, anti LGBTQ, anti immigrant anti-Islam, etc. I think where I actually started to see the most differentiation is how these influencers were trying to craft their own individual personas in communicating that message. So actually the message is the same everywhere, but it's more like how are they trying to build a personal brand to be able to sell that message to their audiences. So indeed, it was stuff like communicating that through various avenues of lifestyle content, you know, maybe this one influencer was much more interested in topics like motherhood and parenting and cooking, another influencer might be more interested in like things like documentaries or sort of traveling around the world and sort of giving speeches and connecting with other far right activists in Europe. So I would say that for each influencer, it was more about trying to fit into what is the type of audience that I want to reach. And sometimes I would see them try very strategies to see if they could tap into new or to different audiences. So as I mentioned earlier, you know, I remember a couple of influencers started speeding a lot of that QAnon rhetoric. And then I kind of noticed that they stopped doing that and I wonder if it's they realized like I'm not really soliciting a new audience by trying to diversify my content in this way. So I think they definitely like most, you know, a political influencers, they try different things to see sort of what lands and what sort of can generate the most visibility for them or new followers. I think as you said, this idea of it's a competitive market and what they're doing is tied to a sort of broader economy of attention. And I'm sure they are watching their platform stats to try different issues, try different things and see what gains traction. And I want to come back to that idea of platform stats a little bit later. Let's talk about the actual platforms that you were you were looking at, and I know that you were monitoring multiple platforms, but a recurring theme throughout the book is that YouTube and Instagram appear as particularly important. So can you describe why these two platforms in particular stood out in your research. I definitely first focused on YouTube simply because it is like the OG home for the far right and sort of for the alt right in particular for for these women and the network that they were connected to in many ways sort of gave rise to their political careers in this space. But then I had realized you know over a bit of time how they started to adopt Instagram more in their content creation. And this is a really striking gender difference between them and the men within the alt right. So like the men in the alt right, these far right women, they were also political commentators on YouTube and reacting to current events or offering hot takes. Unlike their male counterparts, these far right women were also posting on Instagram about the most banal daily aspects of their lives, right things like cooking dinner for their families or just very general household labor tasks. And so I was really struck by this difference and I want to know why were these far right women choosing to showcase this aspect of their daily lives. And of course I know that this is still a social media performance right there's still trying to cultivate this image or this brand of themselves. But they were trying at least to position this aura of authenticity and ways that their male counterparts simply did not. So that's sort of one reason why I kind of starting shifting to including Instagram more in my research for this book, not to mention Instagram is also like a very influencer dominated platform as well right like this. So certainly a lot of built in affordances around things like monetization partnering with various brands for corporate sponsorship, etc. Right. So these are certainly genres and practices that these far right women were very good at sort of exploiting in terms of taking things that were seen as apolitical and politicizing them for their audiences. And I also noticed that there was a gender split in the sense that from what I could tell and at least based on limited information I had was that they tended to have a lot more male followers on YouTube versus a lot more female followers on Instagram. And I think part of it's because they were using these platforms in different ways to reach different audiences. So that was a really interesting unexpected gender split that I saw between these two platforms. And finally one thing that really led me to wanting to focus on YouTube and Instagram is because I was very interested in this. in these visual dominated platforms, right? Like yes, these women are also posting on Twitter, on Telegram to some extent as well some other all-tech platforms, but they thrive on YouTube and Instagram because they really play into, frankly, their looks within the attention economy of these platforms, and they're able to be quite successful on them. - Yeah, and I wanna pick up on a couple of things you said there, but one in particular is this idea of yeah, those are kind of influencer-dominated platforms, there's also their aesthetics as well. But you mentioned at some point in the book that TikTok is a platform that these influencers haven't really uptaken because I think there's a difference between this length of format that you can deliver on YouTube. Do I have that right? - Yeah, I mean, so to be fair, I did submit the book manuscript in September 2022. So I mean, even after just like a year between when I submitted the final manuscript to actually when the book got published, there was definitely some new updates within just that year. I mean, it's crazy to think that TikTok really exploded since the pandemic actually. I think some of these women, they are on TikTok now and they've actually gained a significantly larger followings compared to three, four years ago. I think when the platform is still rather novice, but in general, I think most of them are known by their YouTube and Instagram profiles rather than TikTok. And also, I guess we'll see what happens with the band in the US, right? If that's actually going to affect their TikTok following or not. - Yeah, to be determined, maybe by the time this episode is out. But I also wanted to ask you about something I found really interesting argument that you put forth, which is, I mean, when we think about these women influencers or influencers in general on the far right, the idea of alternative platforms comes up. A number of ones you mentioned in the book, gab, mines, telegram, as you just said. But you make this argument that because of the mainstream aspect of YouTube and Instagram, that they're so kind of public facing platforms, that this gives them a sense of legitimacy to their far right message. And I wonder if you can go into that idea about the, I guess part of it's just the reputation of the platforms themselves as being so mainstream, that it kind of interacts with the extremity of their ideology. - So yeah, that's a great point. And my key argument to the book is that far right women are normalizing and legitimizing extreme ideas to mainstream audiences. So of course, I look at this through the avenue of mainstream social media platforms, like YouTube and Instagram. But I think one reason why that holds is, a lot of men within the alt-right or the far right have been banned from most of the major social media platforms, right? So they've had to resort to alt-tech platforms. And alt-tech platforms certainly play a purpose in terms of sort of continuing to foster that angered identity, trying to create pathways towards mobilization and sort of cementing those bonds that are so important for community building. But mainstream platforms are primarily aimed towards amplification and exposure towards mass audiences. And so these far right women influencers, if they haven't been de-platformed from YouTube and Instagram, why would they leave if they have such large audiences? And that provides the best avenue for them to be able to reach that mass market that's necessary. And so I do think I look at this in a very strategic way in terms of maybe it's not as as coordinated as I think it is, but in my mind, for these far right women, if they can continue to promote these much more extreme ideas into the mainstream, just why not continue to take advantage of those platforms? Now, I will say at certain moments of time, I did notice that these women, they weren't totally de-platformed, but one had faced suspension for a short period of time because she was actually showing photos of her husband's face and he has been from Meta's platforms. But sometimes it was just the most minor things, like having a fact-checked label placed onto a piece of content. Sometimes it was like a flagging of a piece of content, so it was a very minor violations that they would receive for some of the content. But I mean, those are very, very minor violations for what is a massive amount of content that they've put out over these years. Yeah, and just thinking about it now, and I can't believe that in 2024, one can ask this question, but it just occurred to me that Facebook isn't discussed much in terms of these influencers' strategy, which you would think as one of the main mainstream platforms that would play some role. I'm wondering maybe if we are just past peak Facebook when it comes to the far right? Well, we are definitely past peak Facebook, although to be argued, there's quite a lot of boomers that are still on Facebook that are getting radicalized on Facebook. So I think certainly for these women, especially like 2015, 2014, yeah, they were definitely using Facebook actively, but I think they've just realized they have to move where their audience moves. And so if their audience is mostly millennial and Gen Z followers, it would make sense to continue to be as active on Facebook. Definitely. Let's talk a little bit about the research process behind this, which you noted in the book as a form of digital ethnography. And I'm curious if you could tell us about that process of how you actually follow these accounts day to day. I know you mentioned that you set up some accounts specifically for the research process had to deal with ethics approval. So we could give us a little bit of a backstory to the nuts and bolts of the actual research design and follow through. Yeah, so in short, it was messy. And the reason I say that is because I think most ethnographic work, it can get very messy. You sort of start off with an idea about what you want to look for. And then it just rapidly expands as soon as you start getting into the realm of the research process. So I did create fake accounts. For obvious reasons in terms of the risk to my personal safety, I didn't want to use my own personal accounts to follow these women. I will say that I had initially posted some content on those fake accounts, actually some content from what I would argue is from my quote, "real life" and so kind of blurring that boundary about using photos from my real life onto my fake account. But I didn't keep up too much with the posting activity. I think it was just while I was setting up the initial stage of those fake accounts. But in terms of the actual process, I mean, I did write most of this book during lockdown, during COVID lockdown. So I was probably spending an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube and Instagram every day. I was watching hours of YouTube videos. I was also constantly getting notifications on my Instagram account in the evenings, on the weekends, on holidays, about new posts, as well as stories. So another thing is when I started writing this book, they were more regularly just posting on Instagram onto their feeds. But over time, they started to use Instagram stories much more frequently. And it's sort of we can get into perhaps the logistics of why I think that is. But because Instagram stories disappears after 24 hours, I was constantly monitoring my phone every time I'd get alerted about a new story. And I think in terms of doing research like this, where the data can just disappear, whether that's choosing to self-delete or rather that's actually built into the infrastructure of the platform. I mean, I was just constantly online. And I was constantly documenting everything that they were producing. Because I looked back in and over the course of the three years that I was following these women, I noticed that like, for example, some of their YouTube videos had been taken down or changed to private. And only if you had the hyperlink to that video, could you actually get access to that video, right? So it was definitely a very immersive and consuming research process. And I will say that even to this day, I still have those fake accounts. And I still occasionally check their platforms. And I'm not sure if it's necessarily because I've just gotten so used to that. It's been very ingrained to do so. But just I think part of it's like, it's also hard to leave this space once you've been so immersed into it for such a significant period of time. Yeah, and I'm curious. I just thought about this now that I wonder if you can speak a bit to your reflections about what I would assume is a added benefit of studying these in real time. I mean, as you mentioned, on the one hand, there's the benefit that some of this content may be deleted. But I do think that there's probably a difference between immersing yourself in this content as it's happening to get all of the context with it rather than, for example, just kind of going back in time and watching it all at once, if that makes sense. Yeah, I have to say it's hard to create boundaries sometimes around that, right? especially if you're constantly monitoring and trying. this activity and like any update can happen at any point of time, right? So you're very, it's almost like investigative journalism or probably the most similar to that. I mean, to be fair, like I did start writing this in 2019 and so at that point there had already been quite a significant amount of content that had been produced. So I was kind of trying to go through that material but then at the same time also trying to track new material that was coming out, right? And trying to stay updated. And I got mentioned, I submitted the book manuscript in September 2022 and it wasn't published until September 2023. So a year had elapsed from that time and even during that year there was new updates to what was happening in these women's lives that that just didn't make it into the book in the end. So I think part of is it's being worry about trying to stay current and up to date. But then at the same time sort of reminding yourself as a researcher that you're not a journalist, right? Ultimately, what's most important is that you take the information that you do have and then you sort of look into it at a broader scope and think about, you know, how can I analyze this and how can I find meaning within this type of data to sort of extrapolate that to the bigger picture? Definitely. And I think part of this, you know, this immersive experience is what can lead to radicalization, which is I know a topic that you've worked extensively on. And you mentioned in the book a few times about Instagram stories and that they have perhaps a potentially strong potential for radicalization. So I'm wondering, can you tell us a little bit about how these influencers were using stories? Because it's not something that we can often capture for the ephemeral nature of them. But also why you think that these might have some potential effects on on radicalization processes. Yes. So as I mentioned, over the course of writing this book, I had noticed these influencers were using stories more frequently than they had when I had first started. And it sort of started off with what you might see in most Instagram stories, just very banal daily content, things like posting them themselves like cooking dinner for their family or doing the laundry or just very, I'd say very boring things actually. But I do argue that the reason why they post this is that it's a very intentional way of trying to establish a sense of relatability and accessibility with their followers. It's kind of what I say is both aspirational and inspirational content because on the one hand, they're trying to project this image about what they think traditional family life looks like to their followers. So yes, it's them making sour and o' bread, but it's also sometimes a bit more of them in daying activities that you see in daily life. Now, the reason why I also note that there could be strong radicalization potential in a short format like stories is because these influencers, but also over time, or rather once in a while, post something in stories, which was a lot more explicitly political than they would in posts that would just end up in their feeds. So for example, in stories, it was where I would notice a lot more conspiracy thinking things like the great replacement conspiracy theory, this idea that white people are being replaced by non-white people in Western countries as I deliberate orchestration by governments. They would also be posting in particular during the pandemic scientific disinformation about vaccines in combination with also these population replacement theories, disinformation about the medical establishment. So quite a plethora of really problematic content, but because stories do disappear after 24 hours, it's actually been shown that users are very unlikely to report stories to the platform, let alone actually have enough time to enforce moderation if necessary on that content. But also stories offer the potential to really encourage DMs, private messages. And so sometimes I would see these influencers then share screenshots of their followers replies to stories. So we're really facilitating that in group thinking of the content they would post. Other times it was trying to deliberately solicit engagements by themes like Q&As. And so this is why I describe the potential for radicalization within stories as because as a format, it inherently encourages a more interactive relationship between influencer and follower. Absolutely. And I think going back to this idea of kind of the attention economy, I think it is a way to encourage people to actually follow and build the number of followers that one has to get this kind of more or less exclusive content that it would also make sense. These influencers incentivize people to follow by giving them more and more extreme attitudes in this format versus archiving it on their channel. And I will add that also like it was a way for them to test out ideas to to audiences, right, to sort of see if maybe they could solicit attention or provoke something into their followers too. Right. And it's a very safe way for them to to test those ideas because it does disappear. Interesting. And as you mentioned that they may use it to solicit more engagement or host Q&As. So some sort of level of interactivity with followers. I'm curious about the what's happening below the fold so to speak in terms of the commentary that would happen, especially on YouTube because any type of content on social media, but particularly YouTube, I think opens up this kind of space out of nowhere for people to discuss. And I know you mentioned seeing a lot of male commenters, which was surprising, but how did you approach these comments? And what did you find out by just kind of immersing yourself in these conversations as well? Yeah, that's right. I didn't focus on commentators of these influencers. I think because part of it was just my time restriction. And I really wanted to show more the influencer side of broadcasting themselves to their followers. Although interestingly, one of the reviews I had gotten on the manuscripts did bring that up in terms of how how it would be good to see sort of the extension of their influence on commentators, which I agree that would have been great, but I was restricted as well as ethically, I was restricted in terms of my approval to conduct this project. But I think one way to extend this research would be indeed to look at the commentators. So my impression of commentary, especially when it came to YouTube live streams. So I did hop onto a couple of live streams. And what's interesting about live streams is also you can see the chat bar and live function as well, right? And speaking of the online attention economy, one thing that was really striking to me during these live streams is that these influencers would encourage those who donated during live streams by saying that they would take their questions at the top of the chat. So what happens is during a YouTube live stream, if you do make a donation, you get the special destination that shows that you have donated and so your question appears at the top of the chat box. And so these these influences would encourage that by saying we will prioritize those who have donated. And so speaking to the monetization feature of the platforms, that was something that I definitely saw them encourage from their audiences to help guide the subsequent conversations during the live streams. In terms of the gender split, I think on YouTube, my superficial takeaway from that is it's a lot of guys just sort of commenting on their looks and their attractiveness in the comments. So more about their physical appearance. Sometimes the comments are a bit more substantive or leading actually to ideas and to ideology. On Instagram, I see a lot more female commentators actually trying to engage in a more substantive way with their content creation, trying to share tips that they have as well for say being a new mother and breast feeding or you know other tips for cooking. So I definitely see it much more of an interactive relationship on Instagram than on YouTube. But I think part of that is because YouTube, you know it really frames itself as broadcasting yourself, right? Which is quite different from Instagram where I think it's a lot more shaped around trying to at least create this perception of an interaction between influencer and follower. Definitely. And my last question kind of ties into this in the sense that I got the impression from towards the end of the book, you're sort of talking about how these different influencers they would, you know, in some cases try to split their audiences into different accounts, one for parenting, one for politics, or they would sort of go off the grid and focus on their family life. But then they would seem to come back at some point, or they would try telegram or gab or whatever. But they seem to always kind of revert back to YouTube and Instagram. And so I'm just curious to get your thoughts on whether that that is an accurate assessment if that was the pattern. And if so, do you think that these influencers are sort of locked into a certain style of content or maybe just pulled to the platforms for money? Because if they are, then it would seem that their sustainability is kind of of tied to the platforms themselves rather than their particular personalities or ideas. So just curious to get your thoughts. Yes, a really good observation. I would say I would generally agree with that. In a way, part of me feels like sometimes this book feels dated because I'm writing about a movement and a phenomenon which really was at its peak a few years back. And so sort of some of the practices and behaviors of these activists kind of feels locked in within that certain style of content. But like I also said earlier, like if these women are continuing to thrive, continuing to get monetized on these platforms, what is the incentive for them to leave? And some have left and then come back and then come back again, right? So I think there is something that draws them back into spotlight, which is I think they simply enjoy being in that position of celebrity for lack of a better word. I mean, I think they enjoy the attention. And I think ironically for a lot of these far right women who preach against feminism, I think they could actually be the primary breadwinners or their families because of the amount of monetization that they actually receive on these mainstream platforms, as well as the fact that you can sort of choose to donate to them through other avenues like Bitcoin or PayPal, sort of traditional crowdsourced donations. But I think in terms of looking forward or looking to the future, some of these women are certainly not as active as they used to be. And I think that is a sign and I don't know if that's necessarily because they have decided to shift the focus. So I mean, for many of these women, they started out single being in their 20s and being very active traveling around the world. Now they're starting to have families and they're trying to settle down. So with that, the focus of their contents has shifted, but they're simply not as mobile, I would say, as they used to be. And certainly their resources and time has changed fundamentally, too. That said, there are a couple of influencers who really started to pop up during the pandemic within this space that I have continued to track and they are actually surging in popularity as well. So whether they will come to face the same types of obstacles or challenges as, say, the previous generation of far right women have, I think it'll be really interesting to follow. Yeah. And as you said, even though I mean, this landscape is changing so fast that even though some things may seem locked in, I think it's important to have this capsule so that we can look to see how either the strategies or the relationship between these strategies and the platform environment interacts with this far right movement over time. So Dr. Lightig, thanks so much for taking the time out and sharing your research with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I've just been speaking with Dr. Evian Lightig, Marie Curie, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Cultural Studies at Tilburg University. And that's a wrap for this episode of the Social Media and Politics podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Next time we'll continue the focus on influencers with Ryan Davis, co-founder of People First, which is a platform connecting influencers with political campaigns for the American left. But until then, I'm your host, Michael Bacetta, signing off from Alde. See you next time.