(YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.) But his evolution indicates that YouTube doesn’t just impact audiences-the money and fame radicalizes creators, too. Three years ago, Pool’s channel was included in studies about how YouTube serves as a radicalization vector, algorithmically leading viewers to seek out far-right creators and content. Apparently they’ve chosen Pool.įor some time now, misinformation has proliferated and its merchants have thrived on YouTube, particularly on the right. “I know for a fact,” he said during a December 2020 livestream, “the YouTube algorithm drives the majority of my content.” (At other times he’ll complain that YouTube is suppressing his content or will soon ban him outright.) YouTube picks and chooses which content gets views and which creators become famous, he told a Twitter follower. Whenever a right-wing politician, personality or group enters the news cycle, Pool finds a way to sand down their actual, stated beliefs or will claim ignorance.īusiness is booming, per Pool, with a dozen employees on payroll since April, a prominence made possible in no small part by YouTube promoting his work to its front page. There, Pool allows them to peddle their wares before six-digit audiences and receive very little if any pushback. In 2020 and continuing through 2021, a rotating cast of Stop the Steal activists, Capitol rioters, QAnon and Pizzagate promoters, 9/11 truthers, grifters, anti-vaxxers, antisemites, misogynists, cranks, and neo-fascists trundled down to Pool’s Maryland podcast studio to appear on Timcast IRL, his two-hour-plus-long YouTube livestream. Pool’s main focus when reporting, those on the ground with him said, was drawing attention to himself. During shoots, Pool’s head was frequently buried in his phone, diligently tracking social media, only to blame his co-workers or equipment when he couldn’t live up to his clippings. He’d come across as uninterested in interviewing subjects or doing much research. Pool was at times reluctant to leave the safety of his hotel room, according to several of the nearly 30 former co-workers and other acquaintances from the past decade who spoke with The Daily Beast.
This self-generated mythology-an anti-authoritarian truth-teller whose successes stemmed from confronting “ the machine,” as Pool puts it-bears little resemblance to reality.Ĭontrary to the overall manner in which Pool portrays himself, he was not an intrepid field reporter and streamer who barreled into conflict zones filled with an unshakable desire to ferret out the real story. If you buy Pool’s branding, he stands in contrast to the bulk of his journalistic peers: “evil” “liars,” he says, who’ve supposedly capitulated to the agendas of Black Lives Matter, antifa, Democrats, Big Tech companies, feminists, and the like. A former digital media journalist who originally built up his name with on-the-ground reporting and livestreaming, including stints at Vice and Fusion, Pool now postures as a rational centrist or “ disaffected liberal” who grew to loathe the excesses of the left. This glaring omission was not out of character for Pool. He habitually comes to the defense of the Proud Boys, as well.) The following month, Pool used his YouTube platform to say the Oath Keepers had been unjustly “ smeared” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They are going to take the White House and do whatever they can and paramilitary.” (Pool made these comments to then-colleagues at the media company he started.
3 goes chaotic,” Pool said in early September during a recorded conversation reviewed by The Daily Beast.Ī few minutes later, Pool added: “The right-wing militias, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and just the Proud Boys and Trump supporters, they are going to rush full-speed to D.C. “Dude, I’ve had messages from people saying that they’ve already got plans to rush to D.C. What Pool kept secret from his younger, overwhelmingly male, decidedly right-leaning audience during this time is that he seemed to have a pretty good idea what might happen on Jan. After all, he was just commenting on the news. At the same time, in each video Pool tried to separate himself from the hardcore conspiracy theorists. Throughout the fall of 2020, the wildly successful YouTube pundit had spent countless hours hyping the blinkered legal strategies and half-baked fantasies about voter fraud animating the online right.
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