The world wide web is a hotbed for political discourse. As ties between the internet and political process are strengthened, their influence on one another becomes increasingly apparent. For instance, Elon Musk has been “living the meme” through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new federal department named after the Doge meme and dedicated to obliterating government spending. DOGE has been slashing jobs in the bureaucracy and cutting funding to various departments by hundreds of millions of dollars since its creation.
Even before the conjectural ‘Nazi salute,’ the internet had been sensationalizing Musk for years. He has been “living the meme” for quite some time. This is an interesting facet in his rise to immense economic and political power on its own, but the rise of the meme-ified Right doesn’t stop there.
Media personality Matt Walsh was invited as a guest to Donald Trump’s Congressional address. Other online commentators are playing an evident role in shaping political decisions. There is a strong emphasis on suppressing “woke” principles within the incumbent president’s party platform. Social media posts are being leveraged as political directives.
Technology and media are some of the most influential drivers of today’s world. Online social networks in particular have an astonishing potential to sway civic engagement. By implementing various levels of censorship and hosting algorithmic echo chambers, these platforms are reshaping the way Americans are exposed to politics and engage with political information.
This can be an excellent tool for accessibility and awareness among citizens, and can be a useful strategy for politicians to garner support and maintain relevance. But this convergence should also be approached with caution. Online spaces are often breeding grounds for extreme ideologies, and it can be easier to fall down the pipeline than one might expect.
The alt-right is a Right-wing political movement which established its roots using meme culture and internet spaces, such as social networks and chat forums. A key component sustaining the alt-right’s relevance in today’s digital age is its employment of trendy posts and popular culture references that push conservative political priorities while simultaneously mocking the “social justice warriors” and “woke snowflakes” of the Left.
Outside of the more insidious examples of alt-right extremism like conspiracy theories backed by Qanon or Pepe the Frog, blatantly reactionary cohorts rendezvous on alt-right sites like Stormfront or 8kun (previously called 8chan). These claim to promote “free speech” to the extent that they violate the law and threaten national security. The January 6th insurrection was organized on such platforms.
Another popular example of alt-right online extremism is the platform and fanbase of Calvin Lee Vail, better known as LeafyIsHere or Leafy. He was an online YouTube personality notorious for edgy, reactionary content. Leafy became popular by mocking themes like feminism and racial justice, portraying the people supporting these causes as comical and exaggerated — almost caricature-like.
Using clips of video gameplay and a guise of irony and callousness to spew derogatory rhetoric, Leafy cultivated an impressively large fanbase of nearly 5 million young viewers throughout the 2010s. When he was banned from YouTube and arrested, many of the kids who grew up watching Leafy were still too young to even vote, but had the vocabulary to send death threats to other internet users.
A key feature of online extremism is its method of dissenting from mainstream politics. This is what gives the alt-right its ‘alternative’ component, rather than the idea that all of its members wear the fashionable dark MAGA hat — although that would be funny if it were true.
YouTube creator JimmyTheGiant explained his run-in with the alt-right in his own youth. As an aspiring intellectual contrarian, 13-year-old Jimmy “lapped up this sort of right-wing rhetoric because [he] realized it was different to everyone else, and that would make [him] interesting.”
Skepticism towards the status quo is the central appeal to cyber-extremist politics on either end of the spectrum. Although there isn’t a notorious name for the online far-Left, leftist radicals are just as prolific in internet spaces as their right-wing counterparts. Fed up with the inefficacy of liberal democracy and isolated from society, these leftists take to the worldwide web to critique the system and discuss the history or implications of radical politics.
COVID-19 quarantines and panic throughout the 2020s pushed many bored teenagers into gloomy online spaces that reflected a “doomer” mentality, another trendy term used to describe a sense of alienation from society and lack of faith in the world. These spaces appealed largely to young workers disenfranchised by economic strain, marginalized groups such as members of the LGBTQ+ community and Gen Z kids battling anxieties about contemporary, largely politicized issues like climate change.
Considering the self-sustaining and cyclical nature of social media algorithms, they often give way to communist subreddits or anarchist commentators who employ the same humor and trendy terminology while embodying the same discontentment with the world. In these radical spaces, proponents forward new and different solutions to inequality, including communally-owned means of production or decentralized power structures. This makes them magnets for impressionable cynics.
The growing influence of internet culture in politics, exemplified by figures like Elon Musk, points to intricate ties between media and civic life. It’s essential to approach this new era of political engagement with caution and awareness, as the internet may be a double-edged sword: a tool for empowerment and awareness, but also a platform that can easily be exploited to manipulate and divide.
Casey Mendoza is an Opinion Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. He can be reached at caseym4@uci.edu.
Edited by Zahira Vasquez and Logan Heine