Mehdi Hasan knew he had gone viral. The broadcaster and author saw the views ticking up on YouTube; his phone was pinging incessantly. But the realisation that things had become, well, really quite surreal came when an older gentleman approached him at an event in Washington and, in Urdu, said: “I watched you with the 20 crazies.”
The man was referring to the British-American commentator’s appearance on Surrounded, a gladiatorial one-v-many debate web series, hosted on YouTube by Jubilee Media. During the debate – billed as “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives” – Hasan was asked about his “ethnic background”, by a man who the Guardian unmasked as the organiser of two violent far-right protests. Another debater laughed maniacally to applause while agreeing he was a fascist. He was later sacked and condemned – and then raised $30,000 (£22,300) from supporters on a Christian crowdfunding site. The video has now been viewed more than 10m times.
“I saw the massive audience it gets with young people. I thought, well, that’s a good place to be,” says Hasan, who launched Zeteo, his own alternative news platform, last year. “But it’s really cut through in a way even I didn’t imagine – it’s been phenomenal for both good reasons and bad.”
Hasan’s near two-hour debate – diced, sliced and repackaged for infinite resharing – has propelled Jubilee Media into the mainstream consciousness, sparking conversations about the political and societal impact of new media formats, and plenty of existential angst.
Launched in 2017, the rapidly expanding entertainment company has attracted swathes of younger viewers by transforming polarised debate – never in short supply in Trump’s US – into eminently clippable content. The company also produces dating and game shows, but Surrounded – which pits one expert against a greater number of adversaries, who race to a single chair to make their point on a hot political topic – is its most notorious.
In recent months Surrounded has gone where few traditional broadcasters would care to tread, with titles including “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” (31m views), or “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative? (Feat. Charlie Kirk)” (30m views). Its 2024 video with Ben Shapiro – in which a trans man tore into the rightwing pundit in a four-minute rant – was the fifth most-watched election-related content on YouTube.
Its founder and chief executive, Jason Y Lee, who started Jubilee as a non-profit in 2010 after a video of him busking for charity went viral, told Variety that the company wants “to show what discourse can and should look like”. It could become, he argued, the “Disney for empathy”. But how does its performative pugilism sit with its stated aim to “provoke understanding and create human connection”?
Spencer Kornhaber, who writes about popular culture for the Atlantic, believes the idealism is genuine, if shot through with ambition. “Empathy, in the Jubilee context, is standing for voyeurism and curiosity about other human beings,” says Kornhaber. “Lee didn’t say he wants to be the new UN. He wants to be Disney – a for-profit entertainment company that is culturally ubiquitous, will merchandise anything and is known for its ability to spin out franchises.”
Jubilee has benefited from the proliferation of free-speech absolutism, as well as the internet’s shift to social and video, says Julia Alexander, a media correspondent for Puck News. But while it may have started with the aim of transforming negative conversations, it has, she claims, “succumbed to the hateful vitriol that defines a lot of social media”. It never stood a chance against the “unspoken but understood currency of the internet”, she adds: namely, that rage-fuelled and fearful content provokes more engagement than empathy or actually listening.
“I hope that they choose to focus on creating positive content for the internet, God knows we can use it,” she says. “But I worry, because they are a company that is incentivised to continuously scale and perform better each quarter. They’ll have no choice but to continue doing more of these types of videos and just get more extreme.”
Hasan, who is also a Guardian contributor, says he understands viewers’ attraction to the more extreme videos Jubilee has produced. He is the author of Win Every Argument, a book about the art of debating, and argues that traditional media deserted the battlefield, allowing platforms such as YouTube – now the No 1 source of televised entertainment in the US – to commandeer the space.
“Mainstream media did such a shit job of facilitating debate and discussion and [giving a platform to] people with unorthodox views,” he says. “But I do think it’s a balancing act between the two extremes. Between censorship and narrowing of opinion and no standards at all, no guardrails, just put out anything you like on YouTube as long as it gets clicks.”
He also understands – even agrees with – some of the criticism he has faced for going on Surrounded. The writer and disability rights advocate Imani Barbarin argued that while clips of Hasan’s takedown of far-right extremists had been shared by progressives trumpeting his “win”, an equal number had been shared as proof he lost. “We live in a meme-ified culture of politics,” said Barbarin, in a post on X. “Those moments are quite literally being plucked out of space and time […] the surrounding context of that moment no longer matters.”
Hasan says if he has regrets, it was that he did not find out more about the people he was facing, arguing that he was not aware such extremists would be among them. But whether he regrets taking part overall? The jury is out.
“I stand by what I said. I think I did a fair enough job as a debater,” he says. “The bigger meta question is whether the format itself is a problem. Is there value in doing these debates? And I don’t know the answer to that: maybe ask me in five years.”