Summary:
This paper was primarily about comparing the similarities and differences between comments and video content in a selection of right-wing and baseline Youtube accounts. Through analyzing the lexicon, topics, and implicit biases present in the texts, comparisons were made between these groups based on a set of features. Some of the key conclusions drawn are listed below.
- Right-wing accounts are typically more specific in their content, and also contain a higher percentage of negative words, such as “aggression”, “kill”, and “violence”. On the other hand, baseline channels typically contain a higher percentage of positive words, such as “joy” and “optimism”.
- Comments generally use more words such as “disgust” and “hate”, whereas captions typically use more words such as “aggression”, “rage”, and “violence”. Youtube commentators are generally more exacerbated than video hosts on hate and discrimination topics.
- There was not a significant difference in immigrant or LGBT bias between the both types of accounts. However, right-wing accounts tend to have a negative bias towards Muslim communities.
- Right-wing accounts tend to have a higher bias against immigrants and Muslim communities in captions compared to a higher bias against LGBT groups in comments. They also typically raise more topics related to war and terrorism.
Reflection:
I have listed below a line that interested me in the paper.
“Among the top ranked topics for the right-wing captions, we observe a relevant frequency of words related to war and terrorism, including nato, torture and bombing, and a relevant frequency of words related to espionage and information war, like assange, wikileaks”
This statistic did not come as any surprise to me while reading this paper since most right-wing people heavily support increased defense spending to help end the war on terrorism. Wikileaks would also be a hot topic amonst right-wing people since Hillary Clinton’s emails from her private email server were leaked on Wikileaks. I’m also left wondering what the similarities and differences amongst comments and video content on left-wing videos are and how they compare to that of these videos. Would there be just as much negative sentiment on those videos as well? Or would they employ more positive sentiment? A potential glimpse into the answer to this question could be inferred upon from the fact that the study used The Young Turks as a baseline source, which is interesting since their views are fairly liberal. This source ended up having a more positive sentiment when referring to immigrants, LGBT, and Muslim groups. However, that’s not to say that there could exist other groups that left-wing videos may be more hostile towards.
Other Thoughts:
Overall, I wasn’t too surprised with the results of the paper, given the nature of right-wing politics. I’m very interested in seeing how these results compare with left-wing videos, as I believe that hate is likely to be found on the far right and far left ends of the political spectrum.
