Extremists Are Cashing in on a Youth-Targeted Gaming Website

Megan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University who has focused on the migration of white supremacists across mainstream social media platforms and fringe websites throughout the Trump era. Squire submitted research to Southern Poverty Law Center that shows a handful of leaders of the global white nationalist movement are raising significant sums of money through DLive. These leaders include pro-Trump pundit Nick Fuentes, Patrick Casey of American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa), British neo-Nazi Mark Collett and Austria’s Martin Sellner of Generation Identity, who became infamous for corresponding with the man who murdered 51 Muslims in a 2019 terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Matthew Q. Gebert, a State Department official who led the Washington, D.C.-area chapter of a white nationalist organization, also recently started livesteaming on DLive.

Owen Benjamin, a self-described comedian of the white supremacist-friendly “alt-right” movement who was removed from mainstream websites after making statements praising Adolf Hitler, is also making significant amounts of money from the youth-targeted website. In September, Benjamin called DLive a “great service,” saying that one of the platform’s perks was that “young Zoomers” could see him livestreaming “on the front page because I’m their number-one earner now.”

Like Benjamin, the extremists Squire identified to Hatewatch are people who have been suspended or removed from mainstream social media sites and payment processors. DLive is currently providing these figures a lifeline both to promote their content and make a living from it, Squire noted. Fuentes, a 22-year-old white nationalist who has promoted Holocaust denial on his shows and advocated for the use of state violence to kill protesters, cashed out a bit over $68,900 from April 16 through Oct. 22 on DLive, according to Squire’s research. Though he has been suspended from websites and payment processors including YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, Discord, PayPal, Streamlabs, TikTok and Stripe, Fuentes is currently making roughly $326 per day off of DLive, roughly equal to a salary of $119,000 per year. Indeed, Squire found, he brought in nearly $5,000 on election night alone. Fuentes loaned credence to Squire’s findings on Sept. 14, when he tweeted that he made over $75,000 per year, referring to the income threshold for a coronavirus stimulus check.

DLive is a fringe platform, meaning that it reaches a niche internet audience, and researchers of the far right have until now failed to track it as closely as such counterparts as YouTube and Twitch. The comparative isolation of DLive relative to those bigger platforms has at times offered far-right personalities an opportunity to be more openly extreme. For example, Fuentes talked about giving President Trump a “Roman salute” on a livestream hosted there in August, following the close of the Republican National Convention. The term “Roman salute,” sometimes called a Hitler salute, refers to the infamous arm gesture used by Nazis.