A private chatroom that describes itself as “overall fascist like” and contains more than one thousand alt-right users affiliated with 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board has been advertising and carrying out a campaign to “redpill the youth” who are playing the popular online multiplayer game Roblox during the last year.
The servers “Official /pol/” and “/pol/ – gaming” are hosted by the chat service Discord and maintained by a young man who calls himself Lazia Cus in the server and on Facebook. Cus also runs a YouTube channel with anti-Semitic content. Right Wing Watch has obtained access to those servers.
Cus started advertising the campaign to disseminate alt-right propaganda within Roblox games last year as the game began to accrue mass popularity with young gamers. The campaign, which still carries on in some capacity, encouraged participants to download Roblox and to “operate raids/defenses and expand on this project into other platforms”—meaning that users coordinated efforts to take over active games and flood them with alt-right propaganda.
Using social platforms as weapons is a hallmark of alt-right activity online. Other Discord servers that have leaked also show alt-right activists gaming algorithms on YouTube to do digital damage unto their detractors.
The server’s influence spreads into a Google group and on to YouTube, where users enact synchronized raids on YouTube videos critical of the alt-right. En masse, users will use numerous shell accounts to thumbs-down and flag videos until they are down-ranked in YouTube’s algorithm or removed from the site entirely. The raiding process has also extended to Facebook groups of Jewish organizations, and the Twitter account for BuzzFeed.
Last year, at the onset of the campaign, users fundraised a small amount of in-game money to get their campaign launched. Ever since, a small band of 35 users have been playing the Roblox game with the explicit purpose of injecting it with alt-right propaganda. The participants operate a Roblox group within the game called “Kangz,” which is a racist meme that centers on mocking people who believe the Black Egyptian Hypothesis, and requires members of their in-game group to spend in-game currency on a specific digital costume for their characters.
