Neither Mr. Gionet nor Mr. Fuentes responded to requests for comment.
“Everything about this platform is fake,” said Mr. Jovanovic, 34, the longtime streamer. “It’s like a cardboard building that shows Disneyland. As soon as you press on it, it’s death and carnage.”
Mr. Jovanovic said he was suspended from the site in December after being accused of harassing a fellow streamer — an accusation he denies — and later permanently barred after complaining about Dlive on Twitter.
Other far-right users who joined Dlive last year include at least half a dozen believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, some of whom were barred from YouTube when the platform cracked down on QAnon accounts in October.
On Wednesday, apart from Mr. Gionet, far-right-affiliated channels called Woozuh, Gloomtube and Loulz also streamed from the Capitol attack, as did an account called Murder the Media, which is affiliated with the Proud Boys, a far-right, neofascist organization. The words “Murder the Media” were scrawled on a Capitol doorway.
“Are they going to arrest us?” a Dlive streamer named Zykotik wondered aloud while discussing his plans to ignore the citywide curfew in Washington. A man who identified himself as Clifford approached in Zykotik’s stream. “Are you Dliving?” Zykotik asked. The man said he was.
Because Parler, Gab and other sites don’t offer ways to make money, streaming on Dlive has become a key piece of many far-right activists’ strategies, said Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University.
“Most donations are small amounts of money, but some donors give very, very large amounts,” she said. “Some users are giving $10,000 to $20,000 a month to streamers on Dlive.” Top streamers on the platform earned six-figure incomes in 2019, according to Ms. Squire’s research.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
