Analyzing Right-wing YouTube Channels: Hate, Violence and Discrimination
Brief Summary:
This paper sets out to study issues related to hate, violence and discriminatory bias in right-wing YouTube videos. The authors of the paper used as a baseline the “ten most popular channels (in terms of numbers of subscribers on November 7, 2017) of the category ‘news and politics’ according to the analytics tracking site Social Blade.” They then used this baseline to analyze twelve right-wing “news” channels that they selected. The research questions they wanted to answer were the following:
Is the presence of hateful vocabulary, violent content and discriminatory biases more, less or equally accentuated in right-wing channels?
Are, in general, commentators more, less or equally exacerbated than video hosts in an effort to express hate and discrimination?
The authors found that right wing channels tend to have a higher number of words that are from “negative” semantic fields, more directed content towards war and terrorism, and more discriminatory bias towards LGBTQ individuals and Muslims.
Reflection:
- The “Alex Jones’ YouTube channel had more than 2 million subscribers as of October 2017. As stated in an article in The Guardian (24), “The Alex Jones Channel, the broadcasting arm of the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars, was one of the most recommended channels in the database of videos” used in a study which showed that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential election of 2016 in the United States of America (23, 25). At the moment of our data collection, Alex Jones expressed support to 12 other channels in his public YouTube profile. We visited these channels and confirmed that, “according to our understanding, all of them published mainly right-wing content.”
- I thought it was interesting how the authors chose the channels that they were going to study. Like, The Alex Jones Channel makes sense and is defended by being one of the most recommended channels in the database of videos. However, for the other 12, I think it was a little biased to defend their selections by saying “according to our understanding, all of them published mainly right-wing content.”
- Another choice that I thought it was weird to include “YouTube Spotlight”, and “YouTube Spotlight UK” because the authors specifically mention that there is a possibility that YouTube is politically biased.
Future Work:
I would love to see a study like this being done on left wing channels, comparing the results to those found on the right-wing channels.
