Twitter Analysis Shows YouTubers at Center of Racist Harassment Against The Rings of Power Cast
C/W: This article contains information about white nationalist groups, racist hate, and antisemitism.
If you see an * next to links in this article, they will direct to a far-right YouTube channel or a white nationalist website. All links for white nationalist sites have been linked through Internet Archive. These have been included for educational purposes only. Please click at your own discretion.
Amazon Studios’ The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power has become the latest franchise to be targeted by far-right backlash over its diverse casting. On September 7, the show’s official Twitter account, @LOTRonPrime, tweeted their condemnation of “relentless racism, threats, harassment, and abuse some of our castmates of color are being subjected to on a daily basis.” Their statement emphasized that “Middle Earth is not all white,” a response to racist claims that casting non-white actors to play Tolkien’s iconic fantasy characters is appropriation of white, European culture.
Amazon Studios’ statement comes mere months after a similar tweet posted by Lucasfilm’s official Star Wars account. On May 30th, Lucasfilm publicly denounced the racist harassment aimed at Moses Ingram, star of the Disney+ series, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
In fact, the incidents were so similar that comments directed at the media franchises’ Twitter accounts reflected identical top themes. 82% of words used most often in tweets mentioning “@LOTRonPrime” between September 7 and September 8 match the words used most often in tweets mentioning “@starwars” shortly following the account’s defense of Ingram. Most notably, the phrase “people just don’t like the character/show” claimed the top theme in both analyses. The excuse that a show or character targeted by racist harassment is simply “bad” is a common theme levied upon media franchises who include people of color in their leading roles.
Furthermore, the sources connected to the harassment against people of color in The Rings of Power cast and Ingram are the same.
This Medium account previously identified that of over 200 tweets that drove conversation against Star Wars’ defense of Ingram, half of those tweets came from Twitter users who followed at least three accounts associated with a loosely organized group of YouTubers who dubbed themselves “The Fandom Menace.” The Fandom Menace was created in 2018 as a form of protest against the inclusion of actors of color and women in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.
These YouTubers also make up a sizable following of Twitter users driving harassment against the The Lord of the Rings Twitter account. A network analysis of the 347 Twitter users leading the negative engagement mentioning @LOTRonPrime (referred to in this article as “negative accounts”) revealed that nearly half of the accounts they follow are YouTubers (see “Methodology” below). Furthermore, 66% of all distinct negative accounts follow at least one of these YouTubers (see “Methodology” for full list).
This is compared to top-followed accounts by Twitter users driving positive engagement mentioning @LOTRonPrime wherein only 2% are YouTubers.
The top-followed YouTubers by these negative accounts feature channels affiliated with The Fandom Menace. These YouTube channels include:
- The Critical Drinker (followed by 27% of top negative accounts)
- Nerdrotic (followed by 27% of top negative accounts)
- Drunk3P0 (followed by 27% of top negative accounts)
- The Quartering (followed by 20% of top negative accounts)
- That Star Wars Girl (followed by 20% of top negative accounts)
- RK Outpost (followed by 18% of top negative accounts)
- MauLer (followed by 18% of top negative accounts)
- Geeks and Gamers (followed by 17% of top negative accounts)
- Clownfish TV (followed by 12% of top negative accounts)
- Doomcock (followed by 12% of top negative accounts)
- ComicArtistPro Secrets (followed by 11% of top negative accounts)
For upwards of five years, these YouTubers have consistently profited from targeting people of color and women in major film franchises, often under the guise of “fan criticism.” They can be attributed to inciting the racist harassment against The Last Jedi actress, Kelly Marie Tran, dozens of Lucasfilm employees including “Star Wars: The High Republic” show host, Krystina Arielle, Captain Marvel actress, Brie Larson, and Ingram.
The group engages subscribers using a racist conspiracy theory that media is being invaded by “evil social justice warriors” who cast marginalized individuals as leads in big IP. Since this casting is done only for “forced diversity”, the character will always be poorly written and lacking all substance.
Followers of this conspiracy theory are told that the inclusion of non-white, non-cis male characters exist for the sole purpose of replacing straight white men, a belief that shares disconcerting similarities to the ideology of white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute. Additionally, this conspiracy relies on a doctrine popularized by Breitbart founder, Andrew Breitbart, that politics are “downstream” from culture.
To rephrase: the harassment that occurs as a result of this conspiracy is never fan criticism or a disagreement about plot execution. These racist and misogynistic attacks against fans and creators are driven by the fear that if straight white men are “replaced” in cultural milestones like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel franchise films, then white men will concede political power to diverse and progressive policies.
This invented fear of losing “white culture” is on full display in tweets mentioning @LOTRonPrime. In their tweets, followers of far right-wing YouTubers call The Rings of Power “political propaganda” and disparage the show for “mixing ethnic groups”, “appropriating English culture”, and “erasing white people” through an “anti-white attack on our art and culture.” These followers also harassed fans of color who posted Lord of the Rings cosplays, telling fans of Tolkien’s work that Middle Earth’s elves and men “should not look like you.”
Other YouTubers followed by accounts engaging negatively with @LOTRonPrime and its fans include Timcast, a journalist who has used his YouTube platform to defend hate groups like the Proud Boys, right-wing provocateur, Steven Crowder, Comicsgate and Kiwi Farms-backed* commentator, Eric July, Infowars host, Paul Joseph Watson, and ThatUmbrellaGuy, a YouTuber recently reported by Bot Sentinel as drumming up misogynistic hate against Amber Heard.
The top followed accounts who were not YouTubers include figures often associated with far-right ideology such as Libs of Tik Tok, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo, Jack Posobiec, Kyle Rittenhouse, Candace Owens, Donald Trump Jr., StoneToss, Mike Cernovich, and The Fandom Menace-affiliated blog, Bounding Into Comics, which has become a news source for multiple individuals* with ties to white nationalism.
Furthermore, Twitter users followed by negative accounts also include white nationalists Michael Thompson (on Twitter as @BWLH_), white nationalist Steve Sailer (on Twitter as @Steve_Sailer) and neo-nazi news outlet and banned YouTube channel, Red Ice (on Twitter as @redicetv).
All three of these accounts have pushed racist sentiment against The Rings of Power cast. For example, in an article titled “Great Replacement Comes To Middle-Earth: Black Rings of Power Actor Lenny Henry Attacks Critics As Racist For Disliking Show” on white nationalist site, VDARE, Thompson writes* that The Rings of Power is “not about making great art. It’s about replacing whiteness to these cretins.” He continues, “just laugh at them, because the more brazen the anti-whiteness becomes, the more and more white people embrace intoxicating whiteness.”
Sailer also penned several articles about The Rings of Power for VDARE*, commenting that “if you are a giant global corporation like Amazon, it’s a difficult conundrum that the world loves northern European artistry, but also is instructed to resent northern Europeans.” His remarks, like Thompson’s remarks, allude to the belief at the core of videos published by YouTubers such as The Quartering, Nerdrotic, RK Outpost, and Geeks and Gamers that there is growing resentment among white people of European descent in Hollywood.
In a video posted to Twitter and their website, Red Ice hosts, Henrik Palmgren and Lana Lokteff, level similar racist claims. “There are no non-white elves, dwarves and hobbits. Period. This is European mythology. End of story,” asserts Lokteff. The video goes on to aim antisemitic hate and stereotypes against Tolkien’s Jewish grandson, Simon Tolkien.
From well-funded white nationalist institutions to YouTube, the overwhelming evidence of consistent racist attacks directed at people of color cast in hallmarks of American pop culture are important because they are a larger symptom of mainstreaming the “great replacement theory.”
The “great replacement” is an extremist conspiracy theory that claims that Jews and non-white people intend to overthrow white Christians’ position at the top of society, often by force. It has been creeping into American politics for years, most recently through the 180-page manifesto allegedly penned by the Buffalo, NY mass shooter in May 2022. NPR reports that a poll conducted by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research “found that one in three American adults now believes in a version of replacement theory.”
In the Southern Poverty Law Center’s retrospective on Unite The Right, Brad Griffin of white supremacist group, League of the South, is quoted as stating:
“Now that basic concepts like the Great Replacement, Christian nationalism and secession are no longer marginal and taboo, I think we are going to have to make the leap from being a fringe political culture into boring political activists who sell out and reform conservatism like the Religious Right…There will soon be Great Replacement activists like pro-life activists or gun rights activists.”
Regrettably, if you’re a mainstay in fandom, you know that future is already here. It’s difficult to watch any of the thousands of far-right YouTube videos targeting marginalized individuals in pop-culture — their contents typically led by a white man screaming into a camera about the inevitable replacement of white people — and not see these individuals as “activists” for the great replacement.
And, regrettably, if you’ve been in online fandom for almost a decade or more, you know that history is likely to repeat. In 2014 we witnessed how Gamergate was not taken seriously as the canary in the coal mine for today’s political polarization. Today, it remains unclear if white nationalist ideology normalized by “fan criticism” of The Last Jedi and, now, The Lord of the Rings, will be dismissed as “internet trolling” too.
For more information and examples of organized harassment by the YouTubers listed in this article and white nationalism in fandom see:
Calling Out Hate In Fandom Isn’t Enough. We Must Deplatform It.
Methodology
Data Collection
All Twitter data was collected using a python script from Github. Tweets were collected between September 1 and September 10 for the search term “@LOTRonPrime.” Tweets analyzed included English language tweets only. Total tweets analyzed = 58,388.
Data does not include any tweets made from private or suspended accounts at the time of data extraction.
Data set analyzed included 1,000 tweets that had number of total engagements exceeding 35 engagements. “Engagements” are defined as (reply count + like count + retweet count). Engagement count is accurate as of September 11, 2022.
Sentiment Classification
Tweets were reviewed manually using the following guidelines:
- A tweet was “negative” if it was 1) criticizing The Rings of Power (“the show”) in any way, including writing, pacing, visuals, or other production decisions; 2) criticizing the show’s casting for any reason; 3) criticizing other fans of the show and how they chose to engage with the show; 4) any other comment that could be viewed as negative towards the show, Amazon, Amazon employees, or comments including explanations of Tolkien’s lore for the sake of criticizing the show
- A tweet was “positive” if it was 1) praising the show in any way, including writing, pacing, visuals or other production decisions (in tweets where a certain production element may have received praise, but the comment ultimately criticized the show, the tweet was counted as negative); 2) coming to the defense of the show’s actors, the show’s fans, or the show’s production decisions; 3) coming to the defense of Tolkien’s or Tolkien’s family’s intentions and beliefs; 4) any positive sentiment about The Lord of The Rings franchise including celebrating cosplays; 5) any other comment that could be viewed as positive towards the show including excitement from cast members about their role in the show
- A tweet was “neutral” if it 1) did not fall into any of the criteria above; 2) was a media announcement; 3) did not have enough context to be included because context had been deleted or account providing context had been suspended
Note that > 40 tweets were deleted due to suspended accounts, deleted tweets, or inaccurate tagging of the show’s account between the time the tweets were extracted and the time they were analyzed.
The analysis categorized 420 tweets as negative across 347 accounts, 340 tweets as positive across 259 accounts, and 240 tweets as neutral across 172 accounts.
You can view the data set here.
Network Analysis
If a tweet was found to be either negative or positive, the username’s following was extracted from the Twitter API in order to analyze patterns in networks of Twitter users posting positive comments mentioning @LOTRonPrime vs. negative comments mentioning @LOTRonPrime.
A user’s following was extracted using credentials from a personal Twitter developer account and Postman. A user’s ID was obtained from Postman’s user lookup. That ID was input into the following command: (GET https://api.twitter.com/2/users/:id/following).
Due to Twitter API restrictions, a max limit of 1,000 followers could be extracted per username. Given that the majority of users had following counts < 1,000 users, I do not think this restriction had any significant impact on the outcome of the analysis.
The process extracted a total network of 146,967 accounts for users with negative tweets and a total network of 144,394 accounts for users with positive tweets.
YouTuber Classification
Once the network analysis was complete, the list of accounts followed by one or more Twitter users with top engaged tweets mentioning @LOTRonPrime were aggregated in Tableau. The following formula was used to calculate the percentage of total users following a given account: [COUNT(Twitter User Followed)]/[Total Number of Distinct Twitter Accounts Mentioning @LOTRonPrime for Sentiment Classification x]. This formula was then grouped by account followed (see circle graphs above).
I wanted to isolate accounts followed most frequently by Twitter users within the data set. If you refer to the circle graphs above, I wanted to isolate the accounts pictured in white, blue, and orange, which signified a greater percentage of users following these accounts.
To isolate these accounts, the threshold for “top followed” accounts was set to > 10%. This means that > 10% of Twitter users within the data set (344 distinct accounts for negative tweets and 252 accounts for positive tweets) must have followed an account for it to be included in “top followed accounts.” Note that not all users mentioning @LOTRonPrime in the dataset followed any Twitter users. This is why the final distinct account numbers are lower than the distinct account numbers you see in the “Sentiment Classification” section above.
A “top followed account” was considered a “YouTuber” if they had obtained the majority of their following from their presence on YouTube and/or linked their YouTube page in their bio on Twitter.
An account was NOT classified as a “YouTuber” simply for having a YouTube account, even if it could be argued that a percentage of that accounts’ following was due to their presence on YouTube. For example, while Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro appear on high-profile channels on YouTube, Shapiro and Rogan are better known for garnering a following from their presence on other platforms. For Shapiro, it is his work with TheBlaze and The Daily Wire. For Rogan, it is his work on his own podcast and, more recently, Spotify.
Top followed accounts include:
Account Followed (YouTubers Only) | Percentage of Distinct “Negative Accounts” Following (N=48)
| TheCriticalDri2 | 27% |
| Nerdrotics | 27% |
| Drunk3P0 | 27% |
| Timcast | 25% |
| scrowder | 23% |
| EricDJuly | 23% |
| CountDankulaTV | 21% |
| TheQuartering | 20% |
| thatstarwarsgrl | 20% |
| YellowFlashGuy | 18% |
| KinelRyan | 18% |
| alexstein99 | 18% |
| RAZ0RFIST | 18% |
| MauLer93 | 18% |
| GeeksGamersCom | 17% |
| ChrissieMayr | 17% |
| TheLaurenChen | 17% |
| DDayCobra | 17% |
| MelonieMac | 16% |
| TheRippaverse | 15% |
| HAWTToys | 15% |
| ElijahSchaffer | 15% |
| QTRBlackGarrett | 15% |
| RubinReport | 15% |
| PrisonPlanet | 15% |
| RekietaLaw | 14% |
| MsBlaireWhite | 14% |
| GundamIsHere | 14% |
| thevivafrei | 14% |
| SydneyLWatson | 14% |
| Nina7Infinity | 14% |
| ThatUmbrella | 13% |
| xraygirl_ | 13% |
| Lauren_Southern | 13% |
| disparutoo | 13% |
| torc | 12% |
| hodgetwins | 12% |
| ClownfishTVcom | 12% |
| LadyGravemaster | 12% |
| kristanovva | 12% |
| DDay_Cobra | 12% |
| doomcock | 12% |
| ComixDivision | 12% |
| shoe0nhead | 11% |
| mynerdyhome | 11% |
| JayneTheory | 11% |
| EthanVanSciver | 11% |
| AdamCrigler | 11% |
+ — — — — — — — — -+ — — -+
Account Followed (Non-YouTubers) | Percentage of Distinct “Negative Accounts” Following (N=51)
| elonmusk | 56% |
| libsoftiktok | 35% |
| jordanbpeterson | 30% |
| TheBabylonBee | 26% |
| joerogan | 26% |
| DefiantLs | 25% |
| ZubyMusic | 24% |
| benshapiro | 22% |
| MattWalshBlog | 22% |
| RealJamesWoods | 19% |
| ksorbs | 19% |
| GovRonDeSantis | 19% |
| ThomasSowell | 18% |
| TuckerCarlson | 18% |
| TulsiGabbard | 17% |
| LOTRonPrime | 17% |
| rickygervais | 17% |
| MrAndyNgo | 17% |
| JackPosobiec | 16% |
| ThisIsKyleR | 16% |
| TitaniaMcGrath | 16% |
| realDailyWire | 16% |
| prattprattpratt | 16% |
| DudespostingWs | 16% |
| SpaceX | 15% |
| michaeljknowles | 15% |
| jk_rowling | 14% |
| realchrisrufo | 13% |
| RealCandaceO | 13% |
| OrwellNGoode | 13% |
| michaelmalice | 13% |
| USMiniTru | 13% |
| RobSchneider | 13% |
| DonaldJTrumpJr | 13% |
| stone_toss | 13% |
| NASA | 13% |
| Cernovich | 13% |
| disclosetv | 12% |
| VancityReynolds | 12% |
| MarkHamill | 12% |
| GPrime85 | 12% |
| catturd2 | 12% |
| ThatChrisGore | 12% |
| tedcruz | 12% |
| RandPaul | 12% |
| Marvel | 12% |
| ggreenwald | 11% |
| starwars | 11% |
| Snowden | 11% |
| GadSaad | 11% |
| BoundingComics | 11% |
+ — — — — — — — — -+ — — -+
Account Followed | Percentage of Distinct “Positive Accounts” Following (N= 84)
| LOTRonPrime | 45% |
| MarkHamill | 32% |
| BarackObama | 31% |
| POTUS | 29% |
| JoeBiden | 29% |
| AOC | 26% |
| starwars | 23% |
| KamalaHarris | 23% |
| elijahwood | 23% |
| IsmaelC_C | 22% |
| VancityReynolds | 21% |
| VP | 21% |
| ChrisEvans | 21% |
| neilhimself | 21% |
| NASA | 20% |
| nerdoftherings1 | 20% |
| IanMcKellen | 20% |
| WhiteHouse | 19% |
| MarvelStudios | 19% |
| bearmccreary | 19% |
| StephenAtHome | 19% |
| PedroPascal1 | 19% |
| FellowshipFans | 18% |
| TaikaWaititi | 17% |
| DisneyPlus | 17% |
| theoneringnet | 17% |
| myelessar | 17% |
| JamesGunn | 17% |
| SirPatStew | 16% |
| Marvel | 16% |
| DailyRoP | 16% |
| SimuLiu | 15% |
| PrimeVideo | 15% |
| StephenKing | 15% |
| SeanAstin | 15% |
| MichelleObama | 15% |
| JohnBoyega | 15% |
| staceyabrams | 15% |
| RobertDowneyJr | 15% |
| jonstewart | 15% |
| RahulKohli13 | 14% |
| brielarson | 14% |
| pattonoswalt | 14% |
| ZelenskyyUa | 13% |
| TolkienWonder | 13% |
| neiltyson | 13% |
| iamjohnoliver | 13% |
| FindtheWalker | 13% |
| DonMarshall72 | 13% |
| sarahcpr | 13% |
| MarkRuffalo | 13% |
| GeorgeTakei | 13% |
| EmmaWatson | 13% |
| elonmusk | 13% |
| BernieSanders | 13% |
| themandalorian | 12% |
| DiscussingFilm | 12% |
| dave_filoni | 12% |
| ConanOBrien | 12% |
| tolkienprof | 12% |
| SamuelLJackson | 12% |
| PlayStation | 12% |
| Jon_Favreau | 12% |
| IGN | 12% |
| FLOTUS | 12% |
| antonystarr | 12% |
| WholesomeMeme | 12% |
| tomhanks | 12% |
| SenSanders | 12% |
| RealHughJackman | 12% |
| JimCarrey | 12% |
| TheDailyShow | 11% |
| TheAmandaGorman | 11% |
| Sethrogen | 11% |
| SethMacFarlane | 11% |
| SenWarren | 11% |
| PressSec | 11% |
| prattprattpratt | 11% |
| onthisdayinLotR | 11% |
| MingNa | 11% |
| MiddleShots | 11% |
| GennHutchison | 11% |
| ewarren | 11% |
| chrishemsworth | 11% |
+ — — — — — — — — -+ — — — — — — +
Data Visualizations
Data visualizations for this network analysis were created using Tableau.
The wordclouds featured in this analysis were created using R.
To find top used keywords in tweets mentioning @LOTRonPrime between September 7 and September 8 (n=24,556 tweets), tweets were cleaned in R and leveraged the libraries (library (tm)), (library(stringr)). Words were removed from the analysis including all stop words and “lotronprime”, “lotr”, “theringsofpower”, “ringsofpower”, “www”, “http”, “youtube”, “twitter”, “com”, “rings”, “lord”, “elijahwood”, “seanastin”, “billyboydactor”, “domswildthings”, and “donmarshall.”
Top keywords were obtained from a wordcloud visualization created using (library(wordcloud)). Minimum frequency to be featured in the wordcloud = 500.
Keywords were then matched with words mentioned ≥ 500 times in tweets featuring @starwars between May 30th and June 1st. Methodology for that analysis can be found in “Methodology” here.
