There is a phrase that people on X (formerly Twitter) use with each other: “Twitter is not real life.” They use it to remind one another that controversies on the site do not preoccupy the vast majority of people, who are not on X.
My gut tells me this applies to other online platforms. As a test: Do these recent internet controversies ring a bell? Hasan Piker saying it’s OK to shoplift sometimes as a treat; Candace Owens thinking there’s something nefarious going on with Erika Kirk; Conservative commentator Brett Cooper says Nick Fuentes and “Sneako” have aura, but “Clavicular” does not.
Nearly every person mentioned above has been the subject of lengthy media profiles and think pieces. Many of them were critical, with much being made among media types about the way popular online personalities sow moral confusion.
As people take more interest in Christianity online, especially Catholicism, there is rising concern about influencers who cash in with religious content that is either untrue or is simply bait designed to drive engagement. The fact that conspiratorial thinking has begun entering the mainstream should also concern Catholics, because until relatively recently in American history, they were a favorite subject of paranoid theorizing.
When the stakes are this high, how are people of goodwill supposed to uphold truth and clarity? At risk of sounding too Pollyannish, I think when it comes to influencers, we might be caught in a bit of a feedback loop verging on moral panic. The best defense may be politely changing the subject.
Look at Candace Owens’ YouTube show, with nearly 6 million subscribers. By some measures, her show averages 3 million downloads and views a month. Owens peddles celebrity gossip about everyone from French First Lady Brigitte Macron to actress Blake Lively. More seriously and most troublingly, she has spun labyrinthine theories about Charlie Kirk’s murder that implicate not only Kirk’s own wife, but 17th-century Jewish mystics and defunct heretical sects, referring to them collectively as “the Church of Satan.”
Similar language often crops up among online antisemites, the alleged arsonist of a Mississippi synagogue being a recent high-profile example. Owens’ obsession with painting the Talmud and Judaism in a sinister light is part of a trend of rising antisemitism in the United States and online.
But to get out in front of conspiratorial claims, you have to first familiarize non-podcast “normies” with them while a) holding their attention and b) not sounding insane (good luck).
And there are a lot of normies. In a nation of 330 million, only about 70 million of us listen to podcasts or watch them on YouTube. That’s just over twenty percent of Americans. Realistically, how many are closely engaging with the content they consume? If ninjas broke into my house right now and asked me to summarize the top five points of the last podcast episode I listened to, I could not. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Some Catholics may know Owens from her stint on The Daily Wire, and they may have heard about her high-profile conversion to Catholicism. She has made common cause with another public Catholic convert, Carrie Prejean Boller, who was recently removed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission for “hijacking” a televised commission panel. Boller, who has been Catholic for about five minutes, mischaracterized Catholic teachings about Zionism and has publicly beseeched prominent bishops to defend her.
These women’s public witness can and should invite scrutiny, but critics who find their views alarming should also recognize that controversy is their brand. To try to beat them at their own game is to have already lost. British journalist Mary Harrington recently argued in UnHerd that influencers who traffic in conspiracy theory and “perpetual critique” are not actually interested in truth. They want engagement.
“Victory is not the goal,” Harrington writes, “Nor is building anything that follows from it. Resolution holds little appeal; the process of searching sustains the audience.”
Discourse around leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker (approximately 3 million followers) has dominated my X feed for what feels like weeks. Like Owens, he has also made incendiary comments about Israel and Jews and he has been the subject of both positive and negative media profiles for at least the past year.
But I’m not sure either Piker or Owens merit the full extent of the sturm und drang. A recent poll found that 60% of registered voters haven’t even heard of Piker. Twenty-seven percent of verified voters said they had never heard of Candace Owens — and among those who do know who she is, almost twice as many have an unfavorable versus favorable view of her).
Speaking out against lies and hateful speech can be a moral imperative, but in the attention economy, public handwringing about a controversial streamer or YouTuber only raises their profile and incentivizes more outrageous behavior and rhetoric on their part. Attention from serious people risks legitimizing provocateurs as it reinforces their brand image as bold truth-tellers who freak out the Establishment. Keeping quiet doesn’t necessarily equal moral cowardice: Steadfast refusal to engage with objectionable ideas can also signal social unacceptability.
Since engagement only provides more grist for their prolific content mills, what would happen if we let the online enfants terribles simply tire themselves out? It may be more productive than attempting to win an argument with someone whose profit model is provocation-as-entertainment.
We’ve all heard that the only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. But in this case, a little benign neglect might not be such a bad thing. The mental energy we spend worrying about insidious grifters corrupting the young might be better spent figuring out how to make youth sports more accessible, or reversing Americans’ declining volunteerism.
It could work: Dallas banned cellphones during the school day and kids started checking out library books. The influencersphere only hurts us if we let it. So don’t let it.
