The second paper in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by my QUT colleague Klaus Gröbner, whose focus is on transnational similarities between far-right news outlets. The far right has increasingly connected at a transnational level in recent years even in spite of its largely nationalist orientation; CPAC and the network of ‘patriot’ parties in Europe are both vehicles for this, and this has also led to a coalescence in their talking points over time – positioning themselves against ‘the establishment’, aligning themselves with white supremacist ideas, opposing gender policies and LGBTIQ+ rights, and pushing climate change disinformation, for example.
This is also supported by a range of far-right hyperpartisan media with overly hyperpartisan perspectives; they abandon objectivity and factuality in favour of all-lout propaganda. Many such outlets have YouTube channels, and their audiences may overlap with each other. Klaus’s focus is on English-language channels including Fox News, Sky News Australia, GB News, and Rebel News and their presences on YouTube.
He has gathered considerable data on the videos uploaded by these channels over time, even in spite of the limitations of the YouTube API; this includes video content, descriptions, captions, engagement data, and comments. All of these channels have millions of subscribers, and often billions of views; they have uploaded tens of thousands of videos each.
Rebel News was initially somewhat larger in subscriber numbers than Fox News, but Fox News is now the clear leader; Sky News Australia has grown to second place much more recently, following a clear strategy to fully embrace YouTube since 2019 (after setting up a YouTube channel but largely ignoring it since 2007). This is aligned with its takeover and reinvention as a far-right channel by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp.
Fox News also receives the majority of the views, although Rebel News was closely shadowing its growth until 2017, before the latter lost audience engagement as viewers focussed more strongly on Fox News. Fox News tends to receive particular engagement during key periods (elections, COVID-19, etc.).
Topic modelling of the channel content shows a range of topics, which overlap somewhat between the channels. Fox News naturally covers US politics very strongly, but there is also considerable overlap on US political topics with Sky News Australia, and on more British topics between Sky News Australia and GB News. Rebel News remains more isolated from this, with some overlaps on COVID-19 vaccine scepticism and anti-trans views; other than that Rebel News still has a strong Canadian focus.
YouTube commenters also overlap considerably between these channels; Sky News Australia commenters overlap with Rebel News and (later) Fox News and GB News, for instance. Such overlaps are often related to specific topics; Sky News Australia and Fox News commenters overlap especially on US politics, in particular. Fox News commenters overlapped strongly with Rebel News early on, and this might support the assumption that Rebel News had a radicalising effect on Fox News at these early stages; shared topics focus especially on US politics, unsurprisingly. Overall, Sky News Australia emerges as a linking channel between all of these channels.
