Nick Fuentes turns out to matter a lot less than his promoters and detractors have been assuming: His rapid rise is built on foreign bots, not any genuine American fanbase.
The online-extremism-tracking National Contagion Research Institute’s bombshell report shows that the Holocaust-denying, self-proclaimed racist’s “surge into national visibility” was driven by engagement from accounts located outside the United States — mainly in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Strange places indeed to host hordes of “white nationalists”; in fact, all are known hotbeds for “low-cost engagement farms” — outfits whose bots feign online activity by real human people, boosting engagement stats for profit … or other ulterior motives.
Bot-farm signs are all over Fuentes’ stats, per the NCRI; he gets higher engagement in the first 30 minutes of posting than even accounts “with 10-100× more followers,” and the often-foreign profiles that engage with him will retweet multiple recent posts in a short timeframe, “behavior highly suggestive of coordination or automation.”
All of which has made an obscure fringe figure seem a much bigger deal than he really is, and so seemingly worth a warm welcome by podcaster Tucker Carlson and a less-warm sitdown with Piers Morgan.
Fuentes himself understands the value of pumped-up stats, routinely urging viewers to “retweet me” or “retweet this” to amp up his profile.
That is: Fuentes does have real followers — but a lot fewer than it seemed; his sudden rise in popularity is phony (though the fakery might pay off in enough publicity to gain fresh fans).
Who would benefit from such a thing, other than Fuentes himself?
Well, his seeming rise appeals to those eager to gin up fear of a rising nativist right; that explains well the glossy feature in Rolling Stone headlined, “The War on Nick Fuentes is Over. He Won,” as well as the New York Times profile, “Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right.”
But the folks actually paying for the bot farms are most likely hoping to see America torn apart from within by extremist ideas, for starters.
China, Iran and Russia have all exploited bot farms to boost online narratives that help their agendas and hurt their adversaries, especially the United States; any and all could be paying to promote Fuentes’ poison.
As a bonus, li’l Nicky loves these US adversaries: He’s praised China for its abuse of Muslim Uyghurs, cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and appeared on a state-owned Iranian news network.
In short, they’d be overjoyed if Fuentes somehow replaced the late Charlie Kirk as the voice of the young American right — a troll swapped in for a traditional patriot.
And beware: This time, they boosted a hater on the right; next time (or even now), it may be one on the left.
Perhaps worst of all, US “news” organizations are unlikely to heed the NCRI exposé: They’ll keep treating Fuentes as a far bigger deal than he is, and so empowering the little bigot and the dark foreign forces behind him.
No wonder Americans’ trust in the media keeps sinking ever lower.