Atheism-focused YouTube channels shift toward commentary on identity politics.
What Is Not Established Here
The shift this entry describes is established by the cited sources for one of the three people listed: Data & Society’s Alternative Influence records that Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) posted content critical of feminist game critics and academics through Gamergate and became a prominent member of the skeptic community, and that “skeptic” was “a term originally used to refer to a group of YouTube atheists.”
A full-text search of that report returns zero occurrences of “Thunderf00t” or “Amazing Atheist”, and neither of the two journal articles cited here is readable beyond its abstract. The channel pages of both are cited above for what they do establish — that each is an atheism-focused YouTube channel opened in late 2006 — and for nothing more. No source cited on this page establishes that either made the turn toward identity-politics commentary that this entry describes, and none is asserted.
The year is approximate. No cited source dates the shift to 2014; the sources that describe it were published in 2018 and later and treat it as already underway.