This 21-Year-Old Is Investigating Online Extremism and Anti-LGBTQ Hate [WATCH]

Anthony Siteman has spent his college career examining some of the Internet's darkest corners

Anthony Siteman presenting his research at Quinnipiac University. Photo courtesy of Siteman. Design by Sam Donndelinger.

As the internet becomes an increasingly powerful incubator for extremist ideas, young men are finding themselves drawn into online ecosystems that blur the lines between memes, masculinity and hate.

Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than left-wing or Islamist extremists, and studies indicate that right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism fatalities since 2001. In 2025, online radicalization has become more hidden and widespread, with extremists using encrypted apps, gaming communities and private chatrooms to recruit and groom young people. These platforms make it increasingly difficult to detect or intervene, allowing hate-filled and violent ideologies to spread unchecked.

Anthony Siteman, a senior at Quinnipiac University studying political science and public relations, has spent his undergrad researching how radicalization spreads through digital spaces—and even went undercover in extremist chat rooms to understand it firsthand.

As a white cis straight man, the rhetoric of hate he uncovered made him realize the urgency of developing communication strategies that can deradicalize his peers at a time when ideologies in extremist circles that promote violence against LGBTQ people are penetrating deeper into the minds of young American men.

Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, today I am speaking with Anthony Siteman a senior political science and public relations student at Quinnipiac University, whose work specializes in online radicalization, and he even went undercover inside some of these groups as part of that work. Anthony, thank you so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Anthony Siteman: Thank you, Spencer, for having me here.

SM: So you specialize in online radicalization. What got you interested in that? Because I think it’s a big problem in the United States right now. And a lot of the time it’s actually young white men around your age, likely, who are the perpetrators of this.

AS: Yeah, well, you said it right there. Since I’m a young white male and I’m from a suburban Massachusetts town that is mainly white people. So I’ve been around it my whole life and I’ve always wondered why are these people having the views that they have?

SM: Tell me some of the things you saw in your friend groups that was concerning for you in terms of social media.

AS: Yeah, so my concern is that anytime they open up social media, they’re believing anything that they see. And it’s mainly just, you know, “Oh my god, look at what President Biden’s doing. Oh my god. Look at what the Democrats are doing.” For example, when I first moved to campus, I lived with eight guys, all white guys. And you know just getting to know them and seeing what their views are. It just seems like… One is that they’re not even politically active. They don’t understand what’s going on around the world. So they will just believe whatever they’re seeing without doing any research into it.

SM: Did you notice that when they start seeing a certain kind of content, it just keeps going more and more and more of that down a rabbit hole?

AS: 100%. For example, Nick Fuentes. He’s really been blowing up on people’s algorithms. And one time, just a couple of weeks ago, one of my friends was screen sharing his TikTok to the TV and every single post was just Nick Fuentes’.

SM: What do you think of that?

AS: It’s not good. We use these social media platforms every day and we expect them to be so good and great, but they’re really shaping the way we view things, the way that we see things, by pushing these algorithms. When I was doing the research into this—I obviously don’t support any of this stuff—trying to search about radicalization, it would damage my algorithm so much because everything I started getting was pro-Trump, pro-Trump or pro-Republican or just anti-Democrats.

SM: So interesting. And why do you think, especially for like young bros, really, you know, like something about the Nick Fuenteses, about the Andrew Tates, about these people does resonate with your demographic. Why do you think that is in 2025?

AS: I just think that it’s because those conversations, what Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes are saying, is sometimes what kids my age just talk about. And for them to hear it from someone that has some sort of status, some sort of fame, money? That it just really resonates with them because usually you only hear [those] conversations just with a group of teenagers and them talking amongst themselves. So when they hear that someone with some influence is saying the same things as them, it really pushes them to really believe what they’re saying.

SM: I’m gonna sound like a geriatric millennial here, but meme culture and the idea of the cool effect, like there’s something cool and edgy about these guys, I think, to a lot of young men in America. What do you think is up there?

AS: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question. For example, Andrew Tate, he says like, “This is how to be a man. If you wanna be a man, this is how you gotta treat people, this is how you gotta view things. You gotta look at life this way.” Same thing with Nick Fuentes. [He’s] saying like, “If you really care about the white race, if you care about America, then you should be protecting it through these beliefs,” which is just white nationalism.

SM: Growing up in the last 20 years, if I look at what’s happened, there’s been a lot of progress for LGBTQ rights, women’s rights. So I would think that Gen Z guys would be way more sympathetic to women and LGBTQ people, but that’s not necessarily the case. For a lot of guys, it’s gone the opposite direction. What do you think’s behind that?

AS: Despite what progress this country has made or progress around the world, they put this lifestyle out to people and it’s like, “If you follow what I’m doing, what I’m saying, what I’m believing in, then you will get this lifestyle.” People are so influenced by them because no one else [is] saying these things. If you’re saying the stuff that Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate are saying online you’re going to get “canceled” or you’re just not going to get a following. But since they already have that following, they’re allowed to say that stuff, and then people will fall for it.

SM: Right. Wow. Really interesting. And then there’s obviously the Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tates, but then there is a lot deeper radicalization as well that can happen. So tell me about your research project. What was it and what did you set out to do?

AS: Yeah, so my research was just focusing on radicalization on social media platforms. I originally started with just Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok. But the most I could really find is just the people we were just talking about: Tate, Fuentes. So I realized that, yes, they’re monitored to a degree. They still have these hateful people on it, but there isn’t so much radicalization. That’s when I started to go to other platforms like Telegram. I went on Discord. When I was on those apps, then that’s when I was able to find like these more secret groups of people who have all the same opinions and views. But since Discord and Telegram, for example, those are channel-only apps. So you can’t just like, you don’t have profiles. And that’s when I started finding the real radicalization.

SM: And tell me what you mean by that. What do you mean by real radicalization?

AS: So yeah, when I view radicalization, I view it as when people are believing in extremist beliefs and then start using violence or support violence to achieve them. So in those apps, they’re always blaming someone. It’s never their fault. It’s always “us versus them.” And what makes Telegram so useful for these people is that all the messages are encrypted so that it’s hard for them to get leaked or for them to get out there. It’s all basically anonymous.

SM: What were some of the messages or the consistent themes you noticed in these message boards on Telegram?

AS: Yeah, so when I was looking at them mainly, it was before the 2024 election and a lot of the messaging was like, “Democrats, they’re fraud. They’re all illegal. They support all of these bad causes.”

SM: You said that your definition of radicalization is when it gets to a level where there’s violence involved, right? Did you see some of that in Telegram?

AS: Yes, obviously it wasn’t like physical violence, but there’s a lot of people saying, you know, very hateful things, like “Burn all Jews” or “We should send them to the gas chambers.” What they did utilize a lot are memes of these violent events. So, for example, if they have a murder video... because you can access LiveLeak videos online and some of these channels, they would meme them.

SM: What does that mean? To meme a video that’s live of somebody getting murdered?

AS: So for example, there’s a game called Call of Duty and they release trailers for it, obviously. And they took a shooting video at a mosque in New Zealand where over like 50 people died. And they took the clips from that shooting and put it in like a trailer format.

SM: What is the impetus for people doing that with that shooting? Is it Islamophobia? Is it just people being idiots?

AS: I think they just have too much time on their hands. I think that they do wanna instill fear in people and they wanna just take bad events and turn it into something that is “cool.” So I think they wanna do it to just create some more fear and be like, “Look at what we can do.”

SM: And you referenced something that actually just came out of the news today, that there was a big, I think, Telegram leak where young Republican leaders were using hundreds of racist and anti-LGBTQ slurs in a group chat, as well as jokes about slavery and rape. Why do you think it’s just so pervasive, that level of hate? Among, you know, groups that are seemingly just part of the GOP Young People’s Club. And how do you think American politics has played into that? Because obviously, President Trump’s rhetoric is pretty rough sometimes, too. Do you think because it comes from the top, that green lights it for young men in America at large?

AS: Yeah, I think since Trump has [come] into office, he has kind of sent politics down to a very low level where you can kind of say whatever you want, do whatever you want. Since his rhetoric is so bad, it just stoops everyone to such a low level.

SM: What do you think are the groups that we should be most concerned about right now? Because I know you did some research on the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups. What should people be worried about based on what you found in your research?

AS: It can be anyone, it really can. Anyone can be an extremist, anyone could be radicalized. But if I had to say one group, it would just have to be white nationalists. It would have to be white nationalists who believe that America is losing its white identity, that they need to fight to come back, to fight to get their place back in this country.

SM: And why do you think that?

AS: Because just from my research of what I’ve done, they contribute to 75% of extremist-related killings. In the past, about 10 years, there’s been around 440 killings, and yeah, they account for 75% of them. So they are the majority of people who are committing these extremist acts in this country.

SM: Which groups right now are you most concerned about, if any?

AS: I would say the Proud Boys, despite what they say now that they’re not racist and that they’re accepting of all people, yes they are still [an] issue. When I was in their Telegrams, they have chapters all over this country and all over the world, frankly. They have chapters in New Zealand, Australia, all the European countries. So they’re pretty prevalent everywhere. One concern I’m thinking, too, is the rise of Nazis again. I’ve seen that with a lot of Jewish hate and with the rhetoric towards Jewish people now, especially with the war.

SM: And you see that being played out, that kind of anti-Semitic hate in these channels on Telegram.

AS: It’s a mix. I feel like that’s a place where it has split these extremists because there’s the extremists who side with Israel and then there’s extremists who side with Palestine. So I feel like that issue really split them in a way.

SM: When I was doing my work in far-right extremism, there were those groups, there were groups like the Michigan Militia and the Boogaloo Boys, et cetera. But a lot of it was, to your point, decentralized groups. And one of those white supremacists said it was fragmented into a million little pieces as lone wolves. Are you concerned about individuals specifically and the idea of lone wolf acts of radicalization or terrorism?

AS: Yes, because they can be anonymous in that way if they’re not tied to any group and if they are just logging on to their computer sending out hate messages, sending out fake disinformation and all this other stuff? Then yes, it is an issue with these decentralized groups. It’s hard to stop decentralized groups because you don’t know where they’re coming from. You don’t know what platform they’re going to move to next. You don’t know if they’re not even meeting on these social media platforms and they have a secret society where they meet in person somewhere. So it’s hard to really track them. No one uses a real name. No one’s using pictures of themselves. It’s all just them hiding behind a username or hiding behind just a profile.

SM: And they’re probably using things like VPNs and like you said, encrypted messaging. So it’s very hard to track where they are.

AS: Yeah, and one thing I’ve noticed too is that some of these extremists, they’re not even from America. They utilize bots a lot. They utilize taking people’s information and making profiles for them. Especially older people, because as you know, 60-, 70-, 80-year-olds aren’t going to be on apps like X. Sure, there are some. But they’re going to get their information stolen and used on those apps and they won’t even know about it. And so when you see Twitter threads of this elderly woman just arguing why Democrats are so bad, a lot of the time it’s not an elderly woman. It’s someone behind the screen or it’s just a bot running the account.

SM: That’s really interesting. So you think that’s pretty prevalent? These fake kind of older Americans are just patriots, if you will, being run by other types of people.

AS: Yeah, a hundred percent, and I like that you said the word “patriots” because that’s always the word that they have in the bio, like, “American Patriot, U.S. veteran for 20 years,” and you can really tell too because they start like responding to all the same posts with the same message, or they start reposting the same image in all these other threads. So there’s ways to tell, but a normal person isn’t going to go through this person’s profile and figure it out.

SM: What are the main, kind of, rhetorical devices, things you have noticed as it relates to the LGBTQ community and how people are coming after that demographic group in these channels of radicalization?

AS: Yeah, like you said with the pedophilia a lot of like I saw was that “oh LGBTQ people are grooming these kids.” That they want these kids to be in drag shows and just the normal rhetoric that has been being said for the past eight years that we obviously know isn’t true. Mainly about LGBTQ individuals grooming the younger generation to try to pull them into their sickness. And that’s another word too is that they use the word illness, sickness, that they’re not right.

SM: And how prevalent is that? There’s a lot of that, I would guess.

AS: Yeah, so some of the things I saw since it was June, it was a pride month, and they would post on June 1st “Happy groomer awareness month.”

Meme of LGBTQ groomers found online. Courtesy of Siteman.

SM: That’s interesting. What else are you concerned about with artificial intelligence and radicalization? I mean, you’ve mentioned that a few times and that does sound a little scary when you put it like that.

AS: With artificial intelligence, you can get it to say whatever you want and you can get it to post whatever you want. So for example, they could have accounts that are just literally run by AI and spread just such nasty, nasty rhetoric and it’s not gonna get tied back to anyone because it’s AI running the account. They could have someone, just a fake persona on it. But there’s not going to be many repercussions for the account saying it since it’s run by AI.

SM: Super interesting and you know, we’re talking a lot about rhetoric here, right? Why is that still concerning though when it comes to something more violent and actually committing acts of violence and, God forbid, a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or something like that?

AS: Yeah, that rhetoric itself, it’s damaging. Because even though people may not act on it, [they] hear that and internalize it. And if people are in a bad spot, maybe they will act on that type of stuff.

SM: Will you ever see, do you ever see people actually threatening violence in Telegram and saying, “Let’s do event X?”

AS: I would say yes, but they were obviously empty threats, to me at least. I could tell that they would say stuff like, “Let’s go to the streets. Let’s go to a pride parade and go blow it up.”

SM: What about the rhetoric around women specifically and queer women?

AS: They treat women as just [an] extension to the man. That women [are] good only if they listen to you and do everything that you say. The only good thing I heard them say about women is that they give birth to children.

SM: The trans community, specifically, has really been under attack by the politicians in this country, and after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the rhetoric about who the murderer was, even though there was no evidence that the perpetrator was trans, was grossly tied to transgender people. Even though, again, no evidence. What do you make of all of that?

AS: I think that that whole rhetoric came out just because they just wanted someone to blame that wasn’t themselves.

Meme courtesy of Siteman.

SM: Why do you think they chose trans people?

AS: These people are obviously not hearing trans voices. They don’t know any trans voices. They don’t know trans people. They just totally deny their existence. So they just want someone to blame. And it’s probably the easiest for them to blame because that’s what they’ve been using for the past like six years. That “trans are grooming people in libraries, trans are going to the bathrooms” and insane people all that stuff. So it’s just kind of their scapegoat.

SM: I think a lot of it does come down to conceptions of masculinity and bro culture. You talk a lot about communicative devices to kind of push back against this. What else can be done among men in this country to tamp down on that rhetoric, to make it not as cool?

AS: If you hear friends who talk like this, you have to have a conversation with them. And I know that’s what everyone says, but seriously. From what I’ve seen with my friends who have been somewhat radicalized, the best way to get to them is to just sit down and talk to them and just go through everything that they’re saying. Like, you know this isn’t true. You know this isn’t right.

SM: I think a lot of guys might be listening to this being like, “That sounds so hard.” So do you have an example of a conversation you’ve had that you felt has actually worked?

AS: Don’t make them ever feel stupid like, “Oh like why the hell would you believe that?” So you don’t want to be like, “You can’t look at this, you can’t view this.” You just have to be like, “I understand what you’re trying to say. I understand how you got to this view. But you have to understand that this isn’t the full story.” If you find a common ground between the issue that both of you can actually agree on, that’s a good start because it gives you that ability to be like, “You know what, maybe we aren’t that different after all.” And that’s something I’ve really found out like talking with people that claim they’re on the right is that when they start talking and they start saying what they actually believe and how they view things, they sound a lot more left than actual right; they just want to be right because of what you’re saying, that bro culture. Like, “Oh men are on the right and girls are on the left.”

SM: Do you think there is a stereotype that being liberal in America right now is feminine?

AS: Yeah, a hundred percent. 100%. I mean, obviously, I disagree with that. Like I go to a private school and it’s like 90% white. And I remember like when Trump won, it was like, like no liberal wussies allowed. There’s a connotation that if you’re liberal, you’re a loser.

SM: That’s so interesting.

AS: Which obviously isn’t true, and I think that the only reason why they really connect with the Republican Party right now is one, that they fall for a lot of the manipulation and tactics they’re using. But also that the right uses the American flag and the symbols of [patriotism] in America much more than the left does, so for someone who actually fought for the country, they’re more likely to go on the right because they’re more like American flags and country music. Whereas the left, you don’t really see that.

SM: So interesting. What else can we do? Because I think it’s such a big problem in this country getting, honestly, your demographic, 21-year-old white straight men, to be less radical. You can be whatever political party you want, but like, can you leave the radicalization at the door? How do you get people to do that?

AS: Yeah, it is hard. And that’s what I’m still trying to figure out right now. I just did some work looking at counter-radicalization, which is like, for example, there’s a program called ExitUSA where they do private mentoring one-on-one. And that really helps someone. But the issue with that is that people who are radicalized, it’s not easy for them to admit that they’re radicalized. So those are great resources for people that are willing to make that change. But as of right now, it’s hard and that’s why I think talking is just the best thing, just talking to people and just really, like, understand what their views are.

SM: You’re in a group of bros, let’s say a frat party, let’s make it super stereotypical, and everyone else is just spitting transphobia. I would be nervous to interject. How do you intervene in a way that doesn’t make you literally wanna disintegrate?

AS: For me I’d just be like, “Yo, think before you talk. One of these people among us could be transgender. You don’t know what you’re saying and how it affects people, and I know you’re trying to be cool, but you know let’s be respectful.” Because if they’re willing to stoop that low to talk all this hate about one group, then I can stoop that low, and I know that’s maybe not the best tactic but I mean it has worked for me. It really puts them in perspective. It puts them in their place.

SM: I do think the word “cool” is like a big word that I keep thinking about in this conversation, that people think it’s cool to be transphobic or it’s cool to be misogynistic, right? How do we change what young American guys think is cool?

AS: I think it has to come from up top from our leaders allowing this rhetoric to begin with, because it’s like they allow these people to just think that these things are okay to say because their own people are saying it. Yeah, once we have two parties that can just really understand that what these people are saying is not okay, and if they hear these acts of violence or [this] bad language that they go to take action and be like, “This is not okay” to all of their supporters. A good way to help my generation understand it is put on the debate between Obama and Mitt Romney, they’re just so cordial. It’s like, it hasn’t always been like this. You can be on two opposite sides and you can still love each other and still be friends.

SM: And you really haven’t grown up at all with that type of political discourse because when Trump came down that escalator in 2016, you were 12.

AS: Yeah, yeah.

SM: Which is wild to think about. Anthony Siteman, thank you so much for your research in this important space of online radicalization and for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today. I really appreciate it.

AS: Of course. Thank you, Spencer. It has been great being on here. Thank you so much.

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Additional reporting by Sam Donndelinger, Sophie Holland and Jelinda Montes

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