Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube

Homa Hosseinmardi (), Amir Ghasemian, Aaron Clauset, Markus Mobius, David M. Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts ()
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Homa Hosseinmardi: Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Amir Ghasemian: Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Department of Statistical Science, Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122
Aaron Clauset: Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309; BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80303; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Markus Mobius: Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA 02142
David M. Rothschild: Microsoft Research New York, New York, NY 10012
Duncan J. Watts: Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104; The Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104; Operations, Information, and Decisions Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021, vol. 118, issue 32, e2101967118

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: political radicalization; news diet; user behavior; online platforms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:118:y:2021:p:e2101967118

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