The first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.

What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.

Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over. 

There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users. 

For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.

If you’re looking for the moment Google truly crossed over into the zeitgeist, it was likely around 2001. In February 2000, Jennifer Lopez wore her iconic green Versace dress to the Grammys, which former Google CEO Eric Schmidt would later say searches for inspired how Google Image Search functioned when it launched in summer 2001. That year was also the moment when users began to realize that Google was important enough to hijack. 

The term “Google bombing” was first coined by Adam Mathes, now a product manager at Google, who first described the concept in April 2001 while writing for the site Uber.nu. Mathes successfully used the backlinks that fueled PageRank to make the search term “talentless hack” bring up his friend’s website. Mathes did not respond to a request for comment.

A humor site called Hugedisk.com, however, successfully pulled it off first in January 2001. A writer for the site, interviewed under the pseudonym Michael Hugedisk, told Wired in 2007 that their three-person team linked to a webpage selling pro-George W. Bush merchandise and was able to make it the top result on Google if you searched “dumb motherfucker.”

“One of the other guys who ran the site got a cease and desist letter from the bombed George Bush site’s lawyers. We chickened out and pulled down the link, but we got a lot of press,” Hugedisk recounted.

“It’s difficult to see which factors contribute to this result, though. It has to do with Google’s ranking algorithm,” a Google spokesperson said of the stunt at the time, calling the search results “an anomaly.”

But it wasn’t an anomaly. In fact, there’s a way of viewing the company’s 25-year history as an ongoing battle against users who want to manipulate what PageRank surfaces.

“[Google bombing] was a popular thing — get your political enemy and some curse words and then merge them in the top Google Image resolve and sometimes it works,” blogger Philipp Lenssen told The Verge. “Mostly for the laughs or giggles.”

Lenssen still remembers the first time he started to get a surge of page views from Google. He had been running a gaming site called Games for the Brain for around three years without much fanfare. “It was just not doing anything,” he told The Verge. “And then, suddenly, it was a super popular website.”

It can be hard to remember how mysterious these early run-ins with Google traffic were. It came as a genuine surprise to Lenssen when he figured out that “brain games” had become a huge search term on Google. (Even now, in 2023, Lenssen’s site is still the first non-sponsored Google result for “brain games.”)

“Google kept sending me people all day long from organic search results,” he said. “It became my main source of income.”

Rather than brain games, however, Lenssen is probably best known for a blog he ran from 2003 to 2011 called Google Blogoscoped. He was, for a long time, one of the main chroniclers of everything Google. And he remembers the switch from other search engines to Google in the late 1990s. It was passed around by word of mouth as a better alternative to AltaVista, which wasn’t the biggest search engine of the era but was considered the best one yet.

In 2023, search optimization is a matter of sheer self-interest, a necessity of life in a Google-dominated world. The URLs of new articles are loaded with keywords. YouTube video titles, too — not too many, of course, because an overly long title gets cut off. Shop listings by vendors sprawl into wordy repetition, like side sign spinners reimagined as content sludge. And it goes beyond just Google’s domain. Solid blocks of blue hashtags and account tags trail at the end of influencer Instagram posts. Even teenagers tag their TikToks with #fyp — a hashtag thought to make it more likely for videos to be gently bumped into the algorithmic feeds of strangers. 

The word SEO “kind of sounds like spam when you say it today,” said Lenssen, in a slightly affected voice. “But that was not how it started.” 

To use the language of today, Lenssen and his cohort of bloggers were the earliest content creators. Their tastes and sensibilities would inflect much of digital media today, from Wordle to food Instagram. It might seem unfathomable now, but unlike the creators of 2023, the bloggers of the early 2000s weren’t in a low-grade war with algorithms. By optimizing for PageRank, they were helping Google by making it better. And that was good for everyone because making Google better was good for the internet.

This attitude is easier to comprehend when you look back at Google’s product launches in these early years — Google Groups, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Answers. The company also acquired Blogger in 2003. 

“Everything was done really intelligently, very clean, very easy to use, and extremely sophisticated,” said technologist Andy Baio, who still blogs at Waxy.org. “And I think that Google Reader was probably the best, like one of the best, shining examples of that.” 

“Everybody I knew was living off Google Reader,” recalled Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.

Google Reader was created by engineer Chris Wetherell in 2005. It allowed users to take the RSS feeds — an open protocol for organizing a website’s content and updates — and add those feeds into a singular reader. If Google Search was the spinal cord of 2000s internet culture, Google Reader was the central nervous system. 

“They were encouraging people to write on the web,” said Baio. Bloggers like Lenssen, Baio, and Beale felt like everything Google was doing was in service of making the internet better. The tools it kept launching felt tied to a mission of collecting the world’s information and helping people add more content to the web. 

Many of these bloggers feel differently now. Lenssen said he now sees SEO as more or less part of the same nefarious tradition as Google bombing. “You want a certain opinion to be in the number one spot, not as a meme but to influence people,” he said. Most of the other bloggers expressed a similar change of heart in interviews for this piece.

“When Google came along, they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design,” Lenssen said. “If we fast-forward to now, it’s kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then.”

But there is one notable holdout among these early web pioneers: Danny Sullivan, who, during this period, became the world’s de facto expert on all things search. (Which, after the dawn of the millennium, increasingly just became Google Search.) Sullivan’s expertise gives his opinion some weight, though there is one teeny little wrinkle — since 2017, he’s been an employee of Google, working as the company’s official search liaison. Which means even if he doesn’t think they are, his opinions about search now have to be in line with Google’s opinions about search.

According to Sullivan, the pattern of optimizing for search predates Google —  it wasn’t the first search engine, after all. As early as 1997, people were creating “doorway pages” — pages full of keywords meant to trick web crawlers into overindexing a site. 

More crucially, Sullivan sees Google Search not as a driver of virality but as a mere echo.

“I just can’t think of something that I did as a Google search that caused everybody else to do the same Google search,” Sullivan said. “I can see that something’s become a meme in some way. And sometimes, it could even be a meme on Google Search, like, you know, the Doodles we do. People will say, ‘Now you got to go search for this; you’ve got to go see it or whatever.’ But search itself doesn’t tend to cause the virality.” 

Those hundreds of millions of websites jockeying for placement on the first page of results don’t influence how culture works, as Sullivan sees it. For him, Google Search activity does not create more search activity. Decades may have passed, but people are essentially still searching for “Jennifer Lopez dress.” Culture motivates what goes into the search box, and it’s a one-way street. 

But causality is both hard to prove and disprove. The same set of facts that leads Sullivan to discount the effect of Google on culture can just as readily point to the opposite conclusion.

In February 2001, right after Hugedisk’s Google bomb, Google launched Google Groups, a discussion platform that integrated with the internet’s first real social network, Usenet. And that same month, what is largely considered to be the first real internet meme, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” was launched into the mainstream after years of bouncing around as a message board inside joke. It became one of the largest search trends on Google, and an archived Google Zeitgeist report even lists the infamous mistranslated video game cutscene as one of the top searches in February 2001. 

Per Sullivan’s logic, Google Groups added better discovery to both Usenet and the myriad other message boards and online communities creating proto-meme culture at the time. And that discoverability created word-of-mouth interest, which led to search interest. The uptick in searches merely reflected what was happening outside of Google. 

But you can just as easily conclude that Google — in the form of Search and Groups — drove the virality of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.” 

“All Your Base Are Belong To Us” had been floating around message boards as an animated GIF as early as 1998. But after Google went live, it began mutating the way modern memes do. A fan project launched to redub the game, the meme got a page on Newgrounds, and most importantly, the first Photoshops of the meme showed up in a Something Awful thread. (Consider how much harder it would have been, pre-Google, to find the assets for “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” in order to remix them.) 

That back and forth between social and search would create pathways for, and then supercharge, an online network of independent publishers that we now call the blogosphere. Google’s backlink algorithm gave a new level of influence to online curation. The spread of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” — from message boards, to search, to aggregators and blogs — set the stage for, well, how everything has worked ever since.

SEO experts like Sullivan might rankle at the idea that Google’s PageRank is a social algorithm, but it’s not not a social mechanism. 

We tend to think of “search” and “social” as competing ideas. The history of the internet between the 2000s and the 2010s is often painted as a shift from search engines to social networks. But PageRank does measure online discussion, in a sense — and it also influences how discussion flows. And just like the algorithms that would eventually dominate platforms like Facebook years later, PageRank has a profound effect on how people create content. 

Alex Turvy, a sociologist specializing in digital culture, said it’s hard to map our current understanding of virality and platform optimization to the earliest days of Google, but there are definitely similarities.

“I think that the celebrity gossip world is a good example,” he said. “Folks that understood backlinks and keywords earlier than others and were able to get low-quality content pretty high on search results pages.”

He cited examples such as Perez Hilton and the blogs Crazy Days and Nights and Oh No They Didn’t! Over the next few years, the web began to fill with aggregators like eBaum’s World, Digg, and CollegeHumor. 

But even the creators of original high-quality content were not immune to the pressures of Google Search.

Deb Perelman is considered one of the earliest food bloggers and is certainly one of the few who’s still at it. She started blogging about food in 2003. Her site, Smitten Kitchen, was launched in 2006 and has since spawned three books. In the beginning, she says, she didn’t really think much about search. But eventually, she, like the other eminent bloggers of the period, took notice.

“It was definitely something you were aware of — your page ranking — just because it affected whether people could find your stuff through Google,” she said. 

It’s hard to find another sector more thoroughly molded by the pressures of SEO than recipe sites, which, these days, take a near-uniform shape as an extremely long anecdote (often interspersed with ads), culminating in a recipe card that is remarkably terse in comparison. The formatting and style of food bloggers has generated endless discourse for years. 

The reason why food blogs look like that, according to Perelman, is pretty straightforward: the bloggers want to be read on Google.

That said, she’s adamant that most of the backlash against food bloggers attaching long personal essays to the top of their posts is obnoxious and sexist. People can just not read it if they don’t want to. But she also acknowledged writers are caving to formatting pressures. (There are countless guides instructing that writers use a specific amount of sentences per paragraph and a specific amount of paragraphs per post to rank better on Google.)

“Rather than writing because there was maybe a story to tell, there was this idea that it was good for SEO,” she said. “And I think that that’s a less quality experience. And yeah, you could directly say I guess that Google has sort of created that in a way.”

Sullivan says PageRank’s algorithm is a lot simpler than most people assume it is. At the beginning, most of the tips and tricks people were sharing were largely pointless for SEO. The subject of SEO is still rife with superstition. There are a lot of different ideas that people have about exactly how to get a prominent spot on Google’s results, Sullivan acknowledges. But most of the stuff you’ll find by, well, googling “SEO tricks” isn’t very accurate. 

And here is where you get into the circular nature of his argument against Google’s influence. Thousands of food bloggers are searching for advice on how to optimize their blogs for Google. The advice that sits at the top of Google is bad, but they’re using it anyway, and now, their blogs all look the same. Isn’t that, in a sense, Google shaping how content is made?

“All Your Base Are Belong To Us” existed pre-Google but suddenly rose in prominence as the search engine flickered on. Other forms of content began following the same virality curve, rocketing to the top of Google and then into greater pop culture.

Perelman said that one of the first viral recipes she remembers from that era was a 2006 New York Times tutorial on how to make no-knead bread by Sullivan Street Bakery’s Jim Lahey. “That was a really big moment,” she said.

True to form, Sullivan doubts that it was search, itself, that made it go viral. “It almost certainly wasn’t hot because search made it hot. Something else made it hot and then everybody went to search for it,” he said.

(Which may be true. But the video tutorial was also published on YouTube one month after the site was purchased by Google.)

The viral no-knead bread recipe is a perfect example of how hard it can be to separate the discoverability Google brought to the internet from the influence of that discoverability. And it was even harder 20 years ago, long before we had concepts like “viral” or “influencer.” 

Alice Marwick, a communications professor and author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, told The Verge that it wasn’t until Myspace launched in 2003 that we started to even develop the idea of internet fame.

“There wasn’t like a pipeline for virality in the way that it is,” she said. “Now, there is a template of, like, weird people doing weird stuff on the internet.”

Marwick said that within the internet landscape of the 2000s, Google was the thing that sat on top of everything else. There was a sense that as anarchic and chaotic as the early social web was out in the digital wilderness, what Google surfaced denoted a certain level of quality. 

But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”

“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”

The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? 

Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program.

“Prior to 2003–2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?” Dash said. “Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight.”

Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works. As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. 

“At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go,” he said.

Google Answers closed in 2006. Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. 

Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google’s results but for Reddit content. Google’s place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago.

On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI. 

Twenty-five years ago, at the dawn of a different internet age, another search engine began to struggle with similar issues. It was considered the top of the heap, praised for its sophisticated technology, and then suddenly faced an existential threat. A young company created a new way of finding content.

Instead of trying to make its core product better, fixing the issues its users had, the company, instead, became more of a portal, weighted down by bloated services that worked less and less well. The company’s CEO admitted in 2002 that it “tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus” and told Wired at the time that it was going to try and double back and focus on search again. But it never regained the lead.

That company was AltaVista.

On Sunday night, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the final round of the Brazilian presidential election with just over 50 percent of the vote, unseating the far-right Jair Bolsonaro. On Sunday night, Lula, as he’s widely known, told a crowd of supporters, “It’s time to recuperate the soul of this country.” But fully recuperating the country will mean grappling with the strange role of YouTube and other platforms in Bolsonaro’s success — and their continued influence on Brazil’s politics.

As of Monday morning, Bolsonaro has not conceded or even publicly acknowledged the election even happened — and it’s not clear how his supporters will respond to the results. Bolsonaro swept the 2018 Brazilian election amid a global wave of right-wing populism, leading a political movement that gained both supporters and funding through the social quirks of YouTube and Telegram. Now, there’s a serious concern that those networks will activate and begin aggressively denying the results of this week’s election. Blunting those forces will take more than a single election — and as the incoming government looks to consolidate power and legitimacy, YouTube’s pro-Bolsonaro faction will be one of its most visible and vocal spoilers.

Reached for comment, YouTube was quick to point out its efforts during the election cycle. “Throughout the election, we’ve quickly removed videos that violated our policies, and prominently surfaced authoritative sources and limited the spread of borderline content through recommendations,” said YouTube representative Ivy Choi. “Following the TSE certifying the election results, we expanded our election integrity policy to prohibit content claiming the 2022 Brazil presidential election was stolen or rigged, and updated our election results information panel to state the TSE declared Lula as President-elect. We also continue to prohibit and remove ads that promote demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust in elections, including false claims about election results.”

But for many Brazilians, the impact of those efforts can be hard to discern. “YouTube has become one of the most important sources of political information. It’s become more powerful than traditional media, basically,” Brazilian YouTube creator Thiago Guimarães told The Verge. “It’s very obvious [Youtube is] not doing enough. They’re doing less than enough.”

A political movement driven by online platforms

From the beginning, Bolsonaro eagerly tested the limits of what online platforms would allow. He refused to take the covid pandemic seriously, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the country as he baselessly claimed online and at unmasked rallies that the vaccine would turn you into a crocodile or give you AIDS. The latter proved even too extreme for Facebook, which deleted the claim from his page in 2021. It also earned him an investigation from the country’s federal police. Meanwhile, the president’s rabid followers, derisively referred to as “the Bolsominions,” waged a years-long info war not only against journalists and the country’s left but also Brazil’s center-right, who were labeled traitors for not falling in line.

As the election intensified, the online bluster spilled into two different physical altercations involving Bolsonaro-linked politicians. On October 23rd, Roberto Jefferson, a former politician linked to Bolsonaro who was under house arrest, opened fire and threw a grenade at federal police who attempted to bring him to jail. (He was later indicted on four counts of attempted murder.) Then, on the 20th, a federal deputy in São Paulo pulled a handgun and chased a Black man through the streets of São Paulo’s upscale Jardins neighborhood after she claimed he pushed her to the ground for supporting Bolsonaro. (According to several different videos of the incident, it appears the deputy may have just fallen over on her own while being heckled.) Other deputies are now calling for her removal from office over the incident.

Perhaps sensing the precarious nature of Lula’s victory, US President Joe Biden released a statement congratulating him on the win within minutes of it being declared Sunday night. And Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha, is reporting that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is being sent to Brazil to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

Of course, in 2022, a peaceful transfer of power online is necessary for one offline. Which is what worries people like Guimarães. “I’m very pessimistic about it,” he said. “I’m not going to expect anything from YouTube at this point.”

That failure is particularly important because of YouTube’s outsized popularity in the country. Though TikTok has all but eclipsed YouTube’s importance in America, the shortform video app is still thought of as something for young people in Brazil. And YouTube has effectively replaced — or at the very least, become equally as important as — mainstream television in Brazil, according to Guimarães. Brazil is YouTube’s fourth biggest market, with around 130 million active users, while TikTok only has around 74 million.

Exploiting YouTube’s moderation system

According to Guimarães, Bolsonaro’s supporters figured out how to use YouTube’s moderation policies to their advantage. The strategy goes like this: post pro-Bolsonaro propaganda on YouTube; instruct Telegram groups to download it or screenshot it; make clips of it for TikTok and Instagram; wait for YouTube to delete it for violating community guidelines; and then claim they were censored and spread the video and related media across Telegram and WhatsApp.

“It doesn’t matter if the video is deleted — like half an hour after they posted it — it doesn’t really matter,” Guimarães told The Verge. “They don’t really care. What’s important is that they spread this. That’s one of the main strategies, one of the main strategies in this ecosystem of fake news and right-wing propaganda.”

YouTube has also become host to a bevy of pro-Bolsonaro channels, which call themselves “alternative news outlets,” the most infamous being Jovem Pan, which is connected to a right-wing radio station in São Paulo but has amassed millions of subscribers on YouTube. The channel’s hard-right stance has earned it the nickname “Jovem Klan” on Brazilian Twitter.

The video platform’s rising importance in Brazilian culture, along with its overwhelmingly right-wing bent, has led to an inescapable feeling of radicalization in the country at the moment — and a big payday for pro-Bolsonaro YouTube channels. Last year, Brazilian news outlet UOL reported that a network of 12 YouTube channels made millions monetizing content attacking Bolsonaro’s enemies in the country’s Congress and federal court.

Guimarães also said that YouTube advertisements have been an incredibly effective way for Bolsonaro to spend his “Orçamento Secreto,” or “Secret Budget,” a dark money fund he’s been accused of using to buy real estate around the country and to influence the election. Earlier this month, UOL revealed that since August, Bolsonaro has pumped R$21 billion, or $3.9 million, into one of the country’s biggest social programs, which UOL found increased his place in polls by about 7 percent. And last month, The Guardian reported that an NGO called Global Witness was actually able to submit misleading electoral ads to YouTube and had them easily approved by the platform.

“[Bolsonaro’s campaign ads] are on my videos — people are complaining to me. They click on my videos and they’re like, ‘That’s false.’ I’ve watched it, too. It’s there,” Guimarães said.

Beyond fact-checking

Another outlet tracking the absolute tidal wave of Bolsonaro campaign ads on YouTube over the last few months is the English-language independent Brazilian news outlet Brasil Wire. Nathália Urban, a Scotland-based Brazilian reporter for the outlet, told The Verge that American tech companies like Google and Meta have spent four years largely ignoring anything Bolsonaro has said on their platforms.

“He said the most horrible things on social media and no one ever took it down,” Urban said. “Things like forest fires, police killings, racism, misogyny, LGBTQ-plus phobia, everything has been normalized by them. And you never see social media taking an action, not just against him, but also his sons, his supporters.”

But the internet landscape that Bolsonaro took advantage of in 2018 is different now. Facebook is no longer the center of the Brazilian online experience and, similar to the American social web in the lead-up to the November midterms, both Bolsonaro and Lula had to run their campaigns across a much more fractured internet.

“Facebook, in my personal opinion, has lost a hell of a lot of force in Brazil,” Vitória Brandão, a Rio de Janeiro-based journalist told The Verge. “It’s still widely used, but I don’t think it’s as relevant as it once was, let’s say four years ago.”

Another factor working against Bolsonaro was Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, which has grown more aggressive about regulating the flow of internet content during the election. Earlier this month, the court ordered YouTube to demonetize four pro-Bolsonaro channels, including one run by the president’s son Carlos Bolsonaro. It also recently unanimously voted to change the window regarding paid election content online. For 48 hours before the final vote and 24 hours after, ads, monetized political content, and notably, boosted content were forbidden and carried a fine of up to R$150,000 or $30,000 per hour that the content was online. Social networks had two hours to comply, and if they didn’t, the platform’s services could have been suspended entirely.

And the Supreme Electoral Court has been equally firm about the results of Sunday’s election. Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the court, said in a press release, “The result has been proclaimed, accepted and those who were elected will graduate in December and take office on January 1.”

Replacing television news with Facebook Live

It’s not just YouTube that continues to play a major role in spreading right-wing propaganda in Brazil. Bolsonaro leaned heavily on Facebook Live in 2018, using it to circumvent the traditional debate process in one decisive moment of the campaign. But during this campaign cycle, he has focused more specifically on Telegram and YouTube. The former president still used Facebook Live during this campaign — broadcasting live at least once a week and using his page to share sometimes dozens of short video clips each day — but those videos found a broader reach on Telegram and YouTube where they are clipped, remixed, and distributed.

The Telegram groups used by Bolsonaro and his supporters are popular enough that, this month, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ordered content be pulled down off Telegram. In May, The New York Times reported from inside a handful of Bolsominion Telegram groups, calling it a “tide of madness.”

“Unlike in America, I think Telegram, the messaging app — between Bolsominions — has become really popular,” Brandão said. “They’re very organized and they’re very radical.”

Bruno Natal, a Brazilian journalist and podcaster, told The Verge that messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp with easy forwarding capabilities, play a huge part in how Bolsominions connect with each other across the country and have had a profound impact on how voters have followed this year’s election.

“Since Android is the main operating system — to the tune of 80 percent of the market share — and iPhones are incredibly expensive here, iMessage never picked up and WhatsApp has been the main way to exchange text messages for free,” he said. “Of course, it comes with all the issues related to the dark web, meaning anything goes and it is really hard to find the ones responsible. Bolsonaro’s team has mastered this market opportunity and leveraged it to their benefit, especially since they simply don’t care about spreading straight-out lies.”

In many ways, Bolsonaro’s silent disappearance from public life is the safest way forward. If he does make a public announcement, there’s no telling what it could do for his still very passionate base. For every video of Lula’s supporters celebrating in the streets, there is another of evangelical Bolsonaro supporters praying in the streets or trying to attack political opponents. The division Bolsonaro has fomented isn’t going anywhere and has become a powder keg that could go off at any moment.

“It’s not a wave,” Brandão said. “It’s now a full-fledged movement. And it’s here to stay for at least another four years. It’s not just politics. It’s our ideology.”

But while Bolsonaro’s movement isn’t going away, Lula’s win suggests his movement isn’t either. As tense as the election was, Núcleo founder and editor Alexandre Orrico told The Verge it feels like a turning point for the country’s online left.

“In 2018, the right and the far-right came out ahead in terms of understanding social media engagement,” he said. “But in 2022, we are seeing part of the left entering the game.”

Update 4:15 PM ET: Added comment from YouTube representative.

After more than two weeks of chaotic protest, this week, the Canadian government pushed back. On Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the country’s Emergencies Act, enabling new financial restrictions on the protests and signaling harsh new penalties against anyone involved.

For many Canadians, it’s an overdue end to a chaotic protest that has stifled trade and brought alarming weaponry into otherwise quiet communities. But right-wing supporters have a wildly different view of events: figures like Tucker Carlson have portrayed the convoy as a working-class rebellion, and Trudeau’s response has been treated as enacting martial law, leading Elon Musk to tweet (and then delete) a meme comparing Trudeau to Adolf Hitler. 

It’s a shocking split, arguably the single most important factor in the protests, and much of it originates in the fractured way information travels online. Convoy supporters are getting their news from a tangle of Facebook groups, Telegram channels, and random influencers, which is all then amplified and expanded by right-wing broadcasters like Carlson, The Daily Caller, or Canadian right-wing media network Rebel News. These channels promote a sanitized version of movements like the Freedom Convoy, amplifying its hashtags and turning its obscure extremist leaders into celebrities. 

This pipeline — from physical protest to social media to establishment outlets — is what has helped the convoy evolve from a local standoff into a televised event that can raise millions from supporters thousands of miles away. Almost all of that infrastructure pre-dates the convoy itself, drawing from anti-vaxx groups, QAnon, and other fringe communities. And while the convoy itself may soon be broken up by the Canadian government, those online pathways are much stickier.

To understand how this echo chamber works, we have to start with the Ottawa protest itself. The “Freedom Convoy’’ started as a loosely affiliated group of Canadian truck drivers led by a group called Canada Unity, founded by far-right activist and QAnon conspiracy theorist James Bauder. But over the last 30 days, Bauder has managed to build a coalition of fed-up truck drivers, fringe Canadian political party members, neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and an international coterie of scammers, grifters, and low-level online creators that has been able to generate major headlines around the world. 

The convoy’s spread across Facebook didn’t gain any real momentum until a video about the protest was posted on Rumble, a right-wing video platform, on January 18th by a user named Ken Windsor and started to get a few thousand shares. In the caption of the video, Windsor shared links to a page called “Freedom Convoy 2022,” which had been started four days earlier, according to Facebook’s page transparency tools. Windsor had posted several videos on Rumble about truck drivers planning to protest Canadian COVID mandates before this. But the post on January 18th, according to social analytics tool Buzzsumo, was the most-shared piece of convoy content during this first week after it was posted to the Freedom Convoy 2022’s page. 

Windsor’s Rumble video also linked out to a right-wing Canadian video creator named Pat King, who was active in Canada’s Yellow Vests protests, and also promoted the movement’s now-defunct GoFundMe page. Following Windsor’s video, between January 14th and January 23rd, several other Facebook pages and groups were created to support the truckers, including the first sizable Facebook group for convoy supporters, which was initially called Freedom Convoy 2022 but has since changed its name to “Convoy For Freedom 2022 🚚🚛🚚🚛🚚🚛🚚🚛”. The group was also a major initial supporter of the GoFundMe page, with users sharing it on the very first day the Facebook page was launched. 

According to AntiHate.ca, the GoFundMe was run by Tamara Lich, another former Canadian Yellow Vest who works for a Canadian separatist party, and B.J. Dichter, a right-wing commentator known for Islamophobic rhetoric. 

Paris Marx, a PhD candidate based in Canada and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, told The Verge that the Freedom Convoy’s connections to the country’s far-right significantly outweigh its connections to actual Canadian truckers.

“It’s been pretty well-documented at this point that the Freedom Convoy has had connections to the Canadian far-right from the beginning, including having been behind the initial GoFundMe fundraiser,” he said. “It also never really represented a broad swath of truckers — 90% of whom are vaccinated and whose trade organizations distanced themselves from, if not outright opposed, the convoy.”

On January 25th, the Trucking for Freedom group officially connected with the organizers of the trucker’s protest, Canada Unity, and the group’s founder, James Bauder. Trucking for Freedom would become something like the group’s official documentarians during these early weeks. King’s livestreams and high-res photography from the road were distributed through the Trucking for Freedom group. From there, they were shared through a series of small Canadian Facebook pages and groups like Freedom Convoy 2022 Manitoba Info and VI Freedom Convoy 2022 Bearhug Ottawa. 

The reach on this content, though organic, was small. Many of Pat King’s videos, for instance, have been watched less than 100,000 times. In January, posts tagged things like #FreedomConvoy, #freedomconvoy2022, and #TruckersForFreedom were unquestionably local, like an emotional post from the page for the Continental Cattle Carriers, Ltd., in Alberta, Canada, or a viral photo album of children cheering on the truckers.

According to Buzzsumo, the total mentions for “convoy” across the web jumped 195 percent between Tuesday, January 25th, and Saturday, January 29th, peaking on that Saturday with 1,920 total mentions, which coincided with other large groups popping up like “Convoy to Ottawa 2022”. But this was also the last moment the truckers convoy would still be entirely Canadian. From here, it would travel south to the United States but also beyond North America entirely, gaining support from right-wing pages across Europe. 

With that international attention, convoy groups also began to attract scammers and counterfeits. An investigation from Grid News found that five convoy groups were created by a single hacked account (formerly belonging to a woman from Missouri) and a Facebook spokesperson told NBC News that content farms as far as Bangladesh and Vietnam were promoting convoy memes. For instance, on January 28th, a page currently called Freedom People, run out of Bulgaria, created a convoy Facebook group called, “Freedom Convoy Worldwide,” which currently has 9,000 members. (The Freedom People page currently uses the “Freedom Convoy Worldwide” group as a way to advertise a PayPal donation page for itself.) 

The movement’s international spread also introduced it to Facebook’s larger universe of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. On January 24th, a Facebook page run by four people based in the United States posted its first video about the convoy. And based on shares, the page has become so viral that it may be possibly the center of the entire convoy movement online right now. It’s called “2020: What’s the Real Truth,” and, according to Facebook’s page transparency tools, it was originally titled, “2012: What’s the Real Truth,” seemingly based on the 2012 doomsday conspiracy. It then changed its name in January 2021 and pivoted to hardcore anti-vaccine and anti-mask content, posting multiple times a day, advocating for a global revolution against COVID protocols.

But by the end of January, Canadians were no longer leading the convoy — at least when it comes to the movement’s online presence. It was around this time that what is possibly the largest still-active convoy group was created, and it doesn’t appear to be run by any Canadians at all. It’s called “The People’s Convoy – Official,” and it has 87,000 members. The group has five administrators, all of which show ties to the US on their Facebook profiles.

This disorganized second phase of the movement has created real confusion for supporters, according to Sara Aniano, a misinformation researcher who has contributed to the Global Network on Extremism & Technology.

“Users in Telegram chats are being bombarded with conflicting maps, routes, dates, and times that seem to evolve by the hour, and many have expressed confusion,” Aniano said. “I’ve read comments about wanting to see liberal enemies hanging from nooses, but I’ve also read comments about having a big party and bringing food trucks. Again, they’re not on the same page.”

But based on Facebook metrics, the core of the Freedom Convoy was never really anything more than a small collection of local conspiracy theorists who were then suddenly given a megaphone by America’s powerful right-wing disinformation machine. Their campaign was first supercharged by Facebook’s algorithm, which currently favors content shared within local groups, and was then blasted out into every feed and screen possible by ravenous conservative tabloids. American right-wing publisher The Daily Wire, founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, latched on to the story at the end of January and published 66 articles featuring the keyword “convoy” between January 28th and January 31st. And the most popular story of theirs from this time period actually promotes a Facebook group that would eventually get shut down by the platform after barely four days for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies around QAnon.

Amplifying small right-wing political movements like this has become a powerful piece of the conservative toolkit — particularly in the time of COVID. Case in point, over the last month, Fox News aired over eight hours of programming about the Freedom Convoy, warning that an American version was on its way. 

“Fox News has an interesting way of filtering very local events through the prism of its own culture wars, which creates the impression for their followers that they are part of some transnational grassroots uprising,” Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor at Queen’s University and senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, told The Verge. 

But The Daily Wire may have succeeded in putting the convoy on Fox News’ radar. The bulk of the Facebook activity around Daily Wire stories has actually come from a network of larger collaborator pages associated with The Daily Wire itself. Crowdtangle data shows that one January 31st story about the 90,000-member convoy Facebook group was able to get a lot of interactions on the platform because it was shared to Shapiro’s personal page twice, twice to the personal page of a Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles, twice to the personal page of another Daily Wire collaborator Matt Walsh, and once to The Daily Wire’s main Facebook page. The American media attention around the movement accelerated its lifecycle and, in the end, just turned it into another meaningless Facebook meme. 

The last real moment of cohesion within the movement was when GoFundMe shut down the convoy’s donation page on February 5th, causing a massive spike in activity. And engagement hasn’t really come back. In many ways, the GoFundMe shutdown was the defining event of the entire convoy. But it also exposes an ugliness that’s been part of the movement since the very beginning. According to a statement from GoFundMe, the convoy’s fundraiser was shut down after the company was given evidence from Canadian law enforcement that protesters were planning to occupy Ottawa.

Amarasingam said Fox News’ coverage has given a huge boost to fringe anti-government figures like Bauder and King, who would not have been influential enough to spark global interest on their own. As the convoy tails off, he worries those figures will use their new profile to drag followers even further toward the fringes, drawing on the same network of Facebook groups and willing right-wing amplifiers.

“The activism on the ground has probably peaked, but the movement I think is here to stay,” he said. “The organizers will continue to be active on the fringes of the Canadian right, but they are now basically minor celebrities and influencers.”

Ryan Broderick is a freelance tech writer and publishes a newsletter about web culture called Garbage Day.