How “fachatubers” are flirting with Spanish youth

Let's start from the beginning.

According to the Eurobarometer on Youth and Democracy, half of Spaniards aged 16 to 30 get their news from social media. But according to UNESCO, 62% of content creators who discuss current events do not verify the information they share.

It is in this rather diffuse information landscape that a new group of influencers is emerging.

“We only talk about progressivism and wokeness . That’s why we came here,

we the fachatubers .

We express ideas that are censored in the media: their goal is to influence society and change people's votes, but they fail to do so.

While we do.”

Isaac Parejo, alias Infovlogger, a far-right YouTuber at the Spanish weekly El País Semanal

Isaac Parejo (aka Infovlogger), is well known in far-right circles.

“A social media specialist and contributor to El Toro TV’s television programs, he launched his YouTube channel in October 2017, at the time of the turbulent Catalan independence referendum. He had previously worked as a social media manager for a travel agency and as a video technician for other companies,” reports the Spanish website El Huffpost .

“In his videos, [Infovlogger] sometimes appears disguised, for example as a fascist superhero wearing a cape. In others, he monologues into his microphone or hosts debates. Throughout his videos, he does not hesitate to hammer home that Pedro Sánchez [the Spanish Socialist Prime Minister] is a psychopath, that the PSOE [the Spanish Socialist Party] must be destroyed and that Spain resembles

in Venezuela.”

The Spanish news website El Huffpost

And then there is Víctor Domínguez, aka Wall Street Wolverine , literally, the glutton of Wall Street.

Followed by nearly 900,000 people on YouTube (where he hosts the video podcast Cancelled ), He considers (among other things) that anyone who receives a pension is “selfish”, and is convinced that there is a war “between online content creators or influencers who deal with current issues and traditional media”.

In Andorra, Víctor Domínguez has established the headquarters of a business conglomerate “that develops not only its own brand (mainly focused on the video podcast Cancelled) but also activities of the Racks group such as training in cryptocurrency investment.”

Moreover, he readily acknowledges: “ Hatred is very unifying.”

The Spanish weekly recalls that Gen Z grew up with two major crises (the 2008 economic crisis and the pandemic).

“The disenchantment and political responses [of young people] to corruption and access to housing, immigration or natural disasters are the breeding ground for a lucrative business fueled by hatred,” explains El País Semanal.

Conservatism and the far right are on the rise in Europe, in the wake of American Trumpism. And “voting for Vox [the Spanish far-right party] appears to be the first choice of young Spaniards aged 18 to 24, ahead of choices considered anti-political (abstention and blank or invalid votes), according to a poll conducted by 40dB for El País .”

Is there hope? A little.

Journalists are already wondering what they missed: " We have to ask ourselves why we have not been able to self-regulate, why we have ceased to be a counter-power," laments David Álvarez, professor of ethics at the Faculty of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Finally, there is the law. On May 20, the majority of Congress approved (narrowly, by 176 votes to the 170 votes of the right and the extreme right) “the first step towards a reform of the law that regulates the functioning of Parliament, to put an end to the growing number of incidents caused by ultra-fascist provocateurs, accredited as journalists.”

But this is only the first step. And one would have to be in bad faith to believe that this will be enough.