White nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes has been trying to expand his audience for years, and his social media strategy is simple: spam. He’s instructed his army of “groypers” — a loose network of white nationalist trolls who follow Fuentes — to chop up his content and spread it on TikTok, encouraged his supporters to join Threads and “red pill” users, and thanked his followers for uploading clips and edits of his content on other platforms.

His plan to go viral seems to be working, at least on Instagram. Fuentes has claimed he was officially banned on Instagram following the January 6 insurrection in 2021. While there’s no public record confirming that his Instagram ban has been removed, pro-Fuentes content is now rampant on the platform — something Fuentes himself has attributed to Instagram taking “the censorship boot off our necks.”

A Media Matters review of Fuentes content on Instagram found a network of dedicated groyper fan accounts that have racked up millions of views on the platform by posting videos of Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier who has repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler. 

Throughout 2025, Fuentes celebrated his growing popularity on Instagram

During a stream on the video platform Rumble in March 2025, Fuentes laughed at the unbelievable virality of his clips on Instagram. 

“And then I do a show and I’m just like, yeah, Jews run the world, Blacks need to go to jail, women need to shut up,” he said. “It gets 8 million views on Instagram! And it just goes to show it’s like the second that they lift the censorship boot off our necks — literally the second — it becomes a sensation.”

He described Instagram’s moderation change as “very noticeable … almost like one week they flipped a switch and my clips weren’t being censored.” The result? 

“The moment that happened, I just took over Instagram,” said Fuentes. “Literally. They censored me for 10 years. They stopped. Boom. Millions of views on all these clips. People are loving it. … Pretty encouraging to see.” 

In June, Fuentes received a superchat (a paid, highlighted message Rumble viewers can send during a livestream) from a follower thanking him for “endless content to edit” and noted that his “Instagram reach is going strong.”

“Yeah, it’s been going great on Instagram,” responded Fuentes. “I got a little worried because one of my clipping accounts got banned and I thought it was going to be another Holocaust. … But no, it seems like we’re still hanging out on Instagram. So I love seeing the clips go viral and the edits are phenomenal. I really appreciate all the editors out there, they’re doing a great job.” 

During a stream last December, Fuentes credited his newfound success to social media companies not enforcing their own content policies and account bans. He specifically pointed to Instagram as perhaps the “biggest reason” for his rise in popularity, saying, “Instagram stopped deleting my clips. … It used to be the case that if you posted any clip from my show, your whole channel will get deleted. All of a sudden starting this year, you’re able to post the clip without it getting taken down.” 

And he’s right: Instagram is currently inundated with clips and edits of Nick Fuentes.

A dedicated groyper army is drowning Instagram with clips and edits of Fuentes

Videos of Fuentes have racked up millions of views on Instagram, and they’re not hard to find. Unlike on TikTok, where the searches for “Nick Fuentes” and “groypers” are blocked and include content warnings, Instagram freely serves users clips and edits of his content.

Fuentes’ popularity on Instagram is undeniably linked to the network of groyper accounts spamming the platform with his content. These accounts often have some variation of “groyper” as a username, typically use an image of Pepe the frog or Fuentes himself as their profile picture, and list their backup account for users to follow in case of deletion. 

The bio of one groyper account reads “1,000 clippers > 10 news outlets,” a nod to the power of smaller, consistent clipping accounts. 

Groypers regularly upload fancams of Fuentes. Sometimes they’re dark, with Fuentes talking about himself as a “bitchless, rizzless, hoeless, five-nine, chud, incel” while “Creep” by Radiohead plays in the background.

Or upbeat fancams of Fuentes saying the n-word:

Some clippers appear to be trying to misrepresent Fuentes as an innocent, funny figure rather than a virulent racist. For example, the account “Crusader Groypa” uploaded a video with a screenshot of an article titled “Who is Nick Fuentes and Why is His Antisemitism Dangerous for America?” Below the article is footage of Fuentes playing “Rockstar” by Nickelback on Guitar Hero. 

Another video displays text reading “Liberals- nick is a threat to society,” over video of Fuentes getting excited about Minions 2. This is a popular clip posted by fan accounts seemingly attempting to portray Fuentes as a harmless figure. 

Depicting Fuentes as almost a meme-like figure seems to be a key part of the groyper social media strategy. His fans have taken to Instagram with the intention of making people think Fuentes is funny and relatable. They’ve clipped videos of him yelling about the Chicago Bears, playing with a ghost toy, and dancing to the Wizards of Waverly Place theme song. 

Fuentes is able to spread his message and reach new audiences in ways that were previously impossible, likely because Instagram’s algorithm appears to be boosting his content.

For example, a video of Fuentes mocking violence against women that has over 2.1 million views on Instagram was posted by a groyper account with only 1,664 followers.

Instagram’s algorithm seems to be picking up videos from small groyper accounts and blasting them into virality, a theory that is supported by the view count-to-follower ratio on many of the accounts amplifying videos of Fuentes. 

It’s not that groyper accounts have large followings, but rather that they consistently post Fuentes’ content and Instagram’s algorithm seems to be feeding their videos to its users. For example: Instagram Reels, a TikTok copycat, uses an AI-powered recommendation algorithm to tailor a user’s feed. This means that videos on a user’s Reels feed are often being pulled from accounts they don’t follow — and like TikTok, Reels seems to be an equal opportunity algorithm that can widely distribute videos from fringe accounts with few followers to reach millions of users.