Examining the Consumption of Radical Content on YouTube
Although it is under-studied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical “anti-woke” channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of “anti-woke” content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.
(A) Mean and SD of fractions of videos as a function of normalized relative indices across session definitions for each category $k$, $k\in \{\textrm{L,C,AW,R,fR}\}$, for sessions with length $M_k \geq 20$. (B) Average $r$, where $r$ is the fraction of videos of category $k$, $k \in \{\textrm{fL,L,C,AW,R,fR}\}$, for session defintion $\delta=10$ and $\gamma =60$ minutes. Sessions with length $M_v\geq 30$ (2\% of the sessions) are dropped for better visualization.
References
2021
Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube
Homa Hosseinmardi, Amir Ghasemian, Aaron Clauset, and 3 more authors
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
Although it is under-studied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical “anti-woke” channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of “anti-woke” content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.
@article{hosseinmardi2021examining,title={Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube},author={Hosseinmardi, Homa and Ghasemian, Amir and Clauset, Aaron and Mobius, Markus and Rothschild, David M and Watts, Duncan J},journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},volume={118},number={32},pages={e2101967118},year={2021},publisher={National Acad Sciences},}
