Jitarth Jadeja first fell down the rabbit hole when Donald Trump won the presidential election on 9 November 2016. As an Australian who had previously lived in the US, he had developed an avid interest in American politics through Reddit. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter and the election result left him disillusioned, confused and exasperated. He had recently been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and as a university student found himself with plenty of spare time. He turned to the internet to make sense of the world around him.
He soon found Infowars – a far-right conspiracy theory website, which hosts professionally produced video interviews on YouTube with high-profile figures, including Trump himself. “I was socially isolated and had a chaotic mental state,” Jadeja tells Spotlight. “[Watching videos] was almost like an addiction.”
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