To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Peter GuestThere was a brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. With an election looming, the opposition Labour Party was trailing in the polls against a coalition government that was the very definition of establishment—led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister in David Cameron and his Westminster- and Cambridge-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, now president of global affairs at Meta. So the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went seeking the endorsement of Brand, the actor, comedian, and emerging online provocateur whose anti-corporatist screeds to his 9.5 million Twitter followers and 100,000 YouTube subscribers gave him the appearance of a power player. Miliband got Brand’s endorsement but lost the election.Since then, Brand’s reach has exploded. His YouTube channel now has 6.6 million subscribers, his X account more than 11 million followers. But his anti-establishment message has morphed, from a broader, almost coherent response to the politics of fiscal austerity that shaped the UK after the 2008 financial crisis to a series of cultish, Conspiracy-driven narratives that draw in Covid denialism, Russian disinformation, and the far-right-inspired “Great Reset” theory, united by the meta-conspiracy that the mainstream—the “elites”—have darker agendas based on control.On Saturday, the UK’s Channel Four aired an hour-long documentary in which several women accused Brand of rape and sexual assault. Before the broadcast, the comedian came out swinging. In a video on his YouTube channel, titled “So, This Is Happening,” Brand not only denied the accusations, but leveled some of his own: “[It] makes me question, is there another agenda at play?” he said.One of Brand’s alleged victims, speaking on the BBC, called his statement “insulting” and “laughable.” But within the alt-media, there was a show of support from figures including Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer who is awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, who now runs a conspiracy-inflected show on X, and Alex Jones, fined $1.5 billion for lies about the victims of a school shooting. X’s owner, Elon Musk, posted underneath Brand’s video: “Of course. They don’t like competition”—referring, apparently, to those same dark forces referenced by the comedian. The camaraderie between conspiracy theorists, the alt-right, and the “manosphere,” is grimly predictable. Their shared narrative is one of alienation from the mainstream, outsiderdom, and dark forces massing to thwart them. “Opposite day, but with real consequences for people,” as Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation and social media at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, puts it.It’s also their audience strategy and the foundation of their business model. Conspiracy influencers are content producers. Moments that generate intense emotions—even if the content producer is, themself, the focus of the scandal—are fantastic for engagement, and they feed the grim economics of the conspiracy business.Brand’s YouTube channel is a compendium of contemporary bullshit. Covid lockdowns were exercises in social control. The US has “biolabs” in Ukraine; the West’s support for Ukraine is capitalist imperialism. Central bank digital currencies are the government’s attempts to control your money. Evolving gender norms are causing a “crisis in masculinity” and declines in fertility. There are routine crossovers between Brand’s content and the wider conspiracy cinematic universe, with clips on his channels of conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Junior, far-right Hungarian president Viktor Orban, and Carlson, who recorded an interview with Brand in August.Amanda HooverZeb LarsonTristan KennedySimon Hill“I think Russell Brand’s a particularly interesting case,” Joe Ondrack, head of investigations at Logically, a misinformation tracking company, says. “He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end.”That journey is fairly common. The Covid pandemic led to a crossbreeding of multiple conspiracy theories, unifying multiple strands into a broad meta-narrative around elite capture and dark forces below the surface of the mainstream.Like Carlson and others, Brand rarely directly restates conspiracy theories himself, instead presenting himself as “just asking questions.” It’s a rhetorical trick that makes it hard to pin down what is based on belief and where conspiracy influencers are following the money—self-radicalizing in the pursuit of more engagement.“That’s the million-dollar question. How much of it is kind of earnest and genuine and a political shift, and how much of it is grifting?” says Joe Mulhall, director of research at the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate. Mulhall thinks it’s a combination of the two. People get ostracized from the mainstream for views they’ve held or things they say. “And then they find this alternative space online, whereby all of a sudden their numbers grow very, very quickly, and they start to see financial incentives. And so they pivot increasingly in that direction. So it’s kind of symbiotic,” he says.The business of alt-media personalities is not much different from that of other influencers. Top YouTubers can make millions of dollars a year from the platform by collecting a share of its ad revenue. But for conspiracy theorists or people on the political fringes, that can be fragile. They risk losing their entire revenue if they stray outside of the platform’s rules and get cut off, either entirely or by being demonetized—having their ad revenues turned off.A 2022 paper by researchers at Cornell showed that “Alt-Lite, Alt-Right, and Manosphere” content creators on YouTube were increasingly diversifying their off-platform revenue streams, apparently to reduce the risk of demonetization. Tate, whose extreme misogyny finally got him banned from most mainstream platforms in 2022, funnels followers from his remaining channels into his paid-for “Hustler’s University.”It’s a trajectory Brand has also followed. Some of his videos on YouTube have previously been demonetized by the platform after being reported for spreading Covid-19 misinformation. But pinned to the top of the comments under some of his recent posts is a promotional link to a website selling gold, posted from Brand’s account.Brand has also embraced the YouTube alternative Rumble, a Florida-based platform that has picked up a number of exiles from the mainstream. In March, Rumble announced that Brand had reached 1 million subscribers. The financial terms of that arrangement haven’t been released; Rumble didn’t respond to a request for comment.“A lot of these figures will use a range of platforms simultaneously for different purposes. So if they can keep some form of presence on a mainstream platform, they will, and they will stick broadly within the guidelines of that platform, because they understand that the purpose of that is to reach new audiences,” Mulhall says. “And simultaneously, they will use alt-tech platforms for more extreme content, speaking to a harder audience.”Amanda HooverZeb LarsonTristan KennedySimon HillSo-called “alt-tech” platforms like Rumble, Gettr, and Truth Social have become increasingly viable spaces to build audiences, outside of the stricter rules of Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook. While most mainstream platforms have at least paid lip service to reducing the amount of misinformation and conspiracy content, one seems to be embracing it. Under Musk, Twitter has unbanned accounts—including Tate’s—that were previously kicked off the platform, and allowed them to make thousands of dollars off their engagement. “With Twitter’s new monetization policy, there’s a whole host of extreme and difficult or problematic characters that seem to be now, once again, raising money from so-called mainstream platforms,” Mulhall says.Brand hasn’t posted to any of the platforms since his “So This Is Happening” video—but he did perform at a live show on Saturday night, to a loyal crowd. On X many blue ticks—those users willing to back Musk’s vision with $8 per month—have rallied to support the actor. Misinformation expert Owen Jones did a snap analysis of responses to tweets by media organizations about the story. Seventy percent of top-rated tweets were in support of Brand, suggesting that the economics that support his pivot to conspiracy are bulletproof to scandal.“It’s got its own built-in defense mechanism when people are deplatformed, because you’re selling people this idea that everything is orchestrated, you’re right to think that it’s all orchestrated. And if they get taken down, all these people just think, ‘Well, that’s because they were telling the truth,’” Ondrak says. “You know that you have an audience which is amenable to conspiracy theories, that you can come right off the bat with the defense that this is all a lie, this is control, because you know they’re going to believe it.”The allegations against Brand are serious. He may, in time, face consequences in the real world, even as his online profile once again rises, hitched to a self-sustaining elite conspiracy. That conspiracy will roll on, because it’s pervasive, it speaks to something within millions of people. And because its economics don’t just work for content producers, they work for the platforms too.🚀 Want more WIRED in your life? Visit our brand new merch shop!📨 Understand AI advances with our Fast Forward newsletterWhat OpenAI really wantsIndia’s elite tech schools are a golden ticket with a dark sideSexy AI chatbots are creating thorny issues for fandomHow China demands tech firms reveal hackable flaws in their productsThe mysterious power of the platform, the internet’s building block🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters, power banks, and USB hubsJoel KhaliliVittoria ElliottNicole KobieLauren GoodeLexi PandellGregory BarberSabrina WeissSteven LevyMore From WIREDContact© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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