A website that provides a platform for neo-Nazis got its seed funding from Boston elites

fpslem@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 261 points – A website that provides a platform for neo-Nazis got its seed funding from Boston elites
wgbh.org

David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, frequently posts videos on a website called Odysee. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also streams his podcast, “The Alex Jones Show,” on the site. It works a lot like YouTube and attracts millions of views each month.

Anti-hate groups say the site is a hotbed of extremism where users from around the world — including promoters of U.S.-designated terrorist group the Nordic Resistance Movement, Holocaust deniers and Proud Boys supporters — use Odysee’s data storage and financial features to spread their views and raise money. Users also take advantage of the forum’s near complete lack of content moderation. The site’s CEO said he’s dedicated to keeping the company “censorship resistant.”

The site also comes with strong New England ties. Odysee was created by a now-defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and began with seed money from a downtown Boston-based venture capital firm called Pillar VC, financed by a diverse constellation of local investors.

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Stop calling them elites. Call them wealth parasites

Money hoarders. They need a coordinated intervention.

This is kind of a complicated issue. We haven't figured out federated video yet. Hosting is expensive, and instances are unreliable, search is abysmal. If you happen to already know a creator that uses peer tube, it's easy enough to follow them, but like a lot of the fetaverse, discoverability is low.

Odysee bridges that gap between giant, centralized video hosting behemoth Google/YouTube and truly free video hosting.

There are a lot of creators who have ideological aversion to being hosted on YouTube, Which includes a lot of FOSS and privacy people like Louis Rossmann or Naomi Brockwell. It also means unfortunately that there are some people who leave mainstream services because their ideas are so repugnant, that they get banned.

Anyway, here are the official community guidelines from their website.

Content or posts that incite hatred or violence towards a particular group or person(s) based on, but not limited to the following:

Ethnicity, Disability, Nationality, Race, Gender, Religion, Sexual orientation, Social class/caste, Gender identity/expression

Content or posts that promote terrorism, criminal activity, or credibly calls for violence (coordinated or otherwise), for example:

Sincere encouragement of others to go to a particular place to commit/perform violence, or to target groups or individuals with violence

Promotion of recruitment into terrorist and/or criminal groups

Sincere promotion of terrorist and/or criminal groups

Sincere promotion of terrorism and/or criminal activity

So the community guidelines aren't being enforced? I still think that's a problem. The federated video sites I've used (mostly peertube instances, tbh) all have community guidelines, and if they didn't enforce them, I wouldn't use the sites.

Even though they are smaller than YouTube a huge amount of video gets uploaded so they largely rely on reports. The issue is that for the reports to work, people have to actually got to watch their videos and, for their team to get to them, they have to get multiple reports. This was made worse by they capital expenditure they went through while fighting their classification.

I am no content creator but i do occasionally make videos that i want to share.

I am therefore not bound to youtube but i can't use odysee because the recommended videos are clearly racicst. I share a video about goldfish and odysee recommend. Videos about why 'white is better' or 'what i love about Hitlers'... after a talk in the community's discord i realised that it was not a place for me to be in

no peertube instance can handle open registration and last longer than a couple of years.

even google is having a hard time storing all the video that gets uploaded.

Megan Squire, co-author of the report and the center’s deputy director for data analytics,

...

“They want a place that’s not going to tell them they’re not allowed to say hateful, terroristic, illegal things,’’ she said. “Odysee plays that role and that’s a problem.”

If it's illegal, arrest them. If not, well...

I mean, my boy Louis Rossmann prefers Odysee so it's not just a hive of scum and villainy.

Yes because extremists get pushed there. Today you are an extremist if you would like to genocide whole races or want to get rapairable electronics. Totally the same amount of anti-social behaviour

It does seem like law enforcement would have an easier time monitoring the uploads on a smaller platform.

Rossman could self host his arm chair philosophy. instead they choose to associate with degenerates.

Do you know how much it would cost him to host his stuff. He would have to do it instead of his business. Hosting video is not a simple thing. YOU pay for the bandwidth for every user that streams or downloads you video, unless you want him to cut his reach by a 3/4 and host it by torrent. And that is just the video... push notices for new videos because he is not on a broad platform for discoverability, which would also mean he would have to spend allot of time advertising his content... It just doesn't stop.

And that is if he would be OK with most enterprise models on serving his content, which we both know he isn't.

oh yah, self hosting is very expensive.

he should put his money where his mouth is, get off his armchair, and do it.

So he should personally fund the right to repair fight AND host his own videos because you want him too? Spoiled brat much. Welcome to the Blocklist Enjoy your stay.

By that metric, everyone on Lemmy is guilty by association. It's federated decentralized so you get the whole range of shitty opinions.

yes, exactly.

they want to use odysee for discoverability because they know who their audience is.

they would post on Lemmy if we had even more degenerates here.

I don't understand your point. Is Rossmann guilty of associating with criminals because he wants to be discoverable and monetize his content on Odysee?

"guilty by association" are your words.

I am free to judge people by who they associate with and I judge Rossmon for it and tell people that I do.

In the US, the freedom to associate is accompanied by a freedom to not associate, as protected by the first amendment of the US constitution. Much like I can judge someone by what they say I can also judge someone by who they associate with.

There is also Rumble, another cesspool of far-right. They still haven't solved the funding issues and just like truth social I can't see either platform making a profit.

They don't have to make a profit if their intent is to be a propaganda machine. If they serve their purpose then wealthy people will continue donating their money to the cause

And of course the site is built on using a blockchain by a company the government shutdown for fraud.

LBRY, Inc.'s CEO was a political activist named Jeremy Kauffman. The company closed in July 2023 after losing a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission which found that LBRY had sold unregistered securities.

Although a bank(s) are involved, so a public statement from someone with an audience asking said bank(s) why they are supporting hate speech might be cool.

This is almost certainly why Trump's sons have pushed Trump to pretend to back crypto so much. They want in on grifting his followers using crypto.

Every website has a domain registrar and web host. Some use cloudflare in front of it.

The last wave of terrorist right-wing sites were taken offline because they were reported for abuse.

I wonder what's possible here.

GBH News could not reach Odysee’s current leadership for comment on this story. Kauffman responded with a one-line email comment last week.

**“Every so-called journalist at GBH Boston is as evil as a reporter for Pravda, and a proper society would deport, jail, or execute them,” he wrote.****

Kauffman has been criticized for now deleted tweets about murdering trans people. He is also a leader of the Mises Caucus, a national group of Libertarians who the Southern Poverty Law Center says are colluding with far-right leaders to gain political power nationwide.

“High-profile MC members espouse hateful rhetoric and collaborate with white nationalists,’’ the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in a 2022 blog post.

Kauffman most recently made headlines after being connected to a New Hampshire Libertarian Party online post, saying, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” Kauffman posted a video on X showing how he berated federal authorities who came to his house to ask about the post, while claiming nothing unlawful had occurred.>

Ooooooh, thats why they did this one sided hit piece. And just to be clear FUCK KAUFFMAN!!!

LBRY shuts down, but Odysee lives on Kauffman’s company LBRY shut its doors in 2023 after a federal judge ruled in favor of the SEC. But despite LBRY’s closure, Odysee has thrived. More than 40 million visits were recorded at the site between April 2024 and June 2024, according to SimilarWeb, a company that monitors online traffic.

In June, Sam Williams, the founder of another blockchain platform called Arweave and its parent company, Forward Research, announced that he had acquired Odysee. Representatives for Williams did not respond to a request for an interview.>

So I don't get it, either big bad Kauffman is in charge of Odysee, or this new guy who acquired it is? What, no bad things you could say about him so you went to Kauffman knowing you would likely get an unhinged quote after his company Lbry died after the SEC ruling?

Something they they don't get is that censorship resistant to the right, Alt-right. Neo-Nazis, and so on is also censorship resistant the Left, far-left, Marxists, Socialists, and other people. Now if you find that they aren't doing that, then maybe your story has a basis. The vast majority of creators on there are at most small C conservatives and most don't even espouse an opinion.>>

So why's the majority of the recommended videos, channels and comments on LBRY about loving Hitler, how Jews are secretly running the world, and how LGBTQ+ people are degenerates that should be rounded up and put in camps? I got about halfway down the first page of results when I realized I was pretty much blocking 2 out of 3 channels and decided it wasn't worth the effort.

I don't know what to tell you... that is not what I see. Maybe because I am Canadian? I don't know.

Even after growing up with the deeply entrenched racism of rural Georgia, I was shocked at the overt and outspoken racism of Boston and the area around it.

Do you have actual examples? I've lived here (greater Boston area) for over 10 years now and, having grown up in and around WI, the level of racism here strikes me as virtually non-existent in comparison, and where you do see it (lots of systemic artifacts), there is a constant and loud pressure to address it.

I'm not saying that Boston doesn't have issues with racism, at many levels and in many ways, but I hear people claim it's exceptionally worse than elsewhere in the country and I'm just confused. Had family friends from Chicagoland suburbs try to convince me Chicago has less racism issues than Boston and I just can't imagine what the fuck happened to their brains to think that.

The site’s CEO said he’s dedicated to keeping the company “censorship resistant.”

We know that code because Lonnie says the same thing. Nazis.