It started with a news story that had gone mainstream. A German comedian on state TV had used his TV show to doxx a right-wing YouTuber, publishing his name and profession in order to get him into trouble. As the extreme right is often attacking mainstream media, I could see where this was coming from, but I can also see how others thought that this wasn't what investigative journalism on mainstream media should look like. Anyway, in the reporting about that story, I came across a comment, where somebody centrist said about the right-wing YouTuber in question that "at least he seemed to post videos out of conviction, and not about the money".

As it turned out, several of the more popular extreme right-wing YouTube channels in German have weird names related to financial services and investing. And it turns out, that these channels were created for maximum profit as financial channels, until their owners realized that spewing right-wing hate got them considerably more clicks and advertising revenue than talking about investing. The German right-wing YouTube scene is dominated by for-profit fascism. Video titles and thumbnails are created for maximum controversy as clickbait, and of course a lot of the things that neo-nazis say are perfect for that purpose. Only that the owners of these channels don't actually believe in the populist nazi crap they are spreading, they just do it to attract a maximum of advertising revenue. I'm not even sure that a lot of the companies paying for that advertising realize where their money is going.

The whole thing depressed me that much, I wasn't up for the challenge to see how it is in other countries. I saw glimpses of that in the stories around the bankruptcy of Alex Jones' Infowars, where far-right conspiracy theories were peddled in order to promote food supplements. But then, those court cases showed that he was believing his own bullshit. Somehow I find a greedy guy who doesn't believe in anything and makes up nazi propaganda with the help of AI to make a profit even worse than the idiotic true believers.