A new documentary series by hugely popular journalist Louis Theroux is set to hit our screens this Sunday, February 13.
In his first series of completely new material since the BAFTA-award-winning Altered States in 2018, documentary maker and journalist Louis Theroux returns to the USA to explore the impact of the internet and social media on some of the most controversial corners of American society.
Travelling the length and breadth of the United States, Louis meets a variety of fascinating and occasionally troubling content creators.
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These include young streamers who promote far-right views; rappers who commodify their overly chaotic lifestyles; and porn performers making their income via subscription-based social media accounts and using their fresh autonomy to call out bad, and sometimes illegal, behaviour exhibited by industry predators.
Those familiar with Louis' previous documentaries will recognise these as three worlds explored by the 51-year-old before. But the impact of online media has transformed each of them, for good and ill, in ways that have profound implications for those involved and also for the wider world. In Sunday night's episode, which airs at 9pm on BBC Two and iPlayer, Louis meets the latest incarnation of the American far right: a political movement born out of the internet and increasingly making its presence felt in the real world.
The documentary maker meets up with the 'young and inflammatory' figures who came to the attention of the broader public at the start of 2021 during the Capitol Hill riots.
Louis immerses himself in a growing online community that has navigated the threats of deplatforming to gather a vast audience on phones and laptops around the world, promoting an ideology that is racist, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic, often packaging the most extreme views as 'irony'.
With the movement's most prominent voices having an increasing influence away from the digital realm, Louis attempts to understand their recent surge in popularity and challenges the divisive rhetoric that is being streamed to millions of young viewers online. Louis has told The Independent that the three part series was 'tough to make', and feature 'scenes and confrontations that are shocking and upsetting'.
He said: "They are also powerful depictions of a world that has become strange in ways we could never have imagined just 10 years ago.
“They show the dangers of the technotopia we all now inhabit, where extremist content can be piped directly into the phones and laptops of millions of children. “But they also illustrate some of the positive opportunities the new world has created by disrupting old hierarchies of power.”
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