Analyzing Right-wing YouTube Channels: Hate, Violence and Discrimination
Summary
This study conducted research on determining if presence of hateful vocabulary, violent content and discriminatory biases are depicted in right-wing channels and if commentators are exacerbated by these videos to express hate. These research questions were answered by an analysis of similarities and differences between users’ comments and video content in a selection of right-wing channels and compared it a baseline set using a three-layered approach: analysis of lexicon, topics and implicit biases present in the texts. They collected right-wing videos from Alex Jones’ channel and other 12 channels supported by him. The researchers collected the baseline videos from videos posted in the ten most popular channels in the “news and politics” category.
Reflection
Overall, I found it interesting that this paper chose to analyze YouTube videos that are right-wing related instead of articles. There are countless right-wing articles being published by media outlets like Breitbart. In addition, plenty of people will always read text content such as new articles, magazines, and newspapers,. over viewing videos. Personally, I view YouTube videos as a form of content that individuals are consuming exponentially more every day in the past few years. Therefore, I believe it was a wise choice of the researchers of this paper to analyze videos versus articles.
After reading this paper, I view this research as being very valuable to society because YouTube as a platform has let right-wing voices be heard by bigger and bigger audiences. This is proven by the fact that “…findings of a 2018 newspaper investigation [32] which shows that YouTube’s recommendations often lead users to channels that feature highly partisan viewpoints – even for users that have not shown interest in such content”. This is especially a problem if behaviors associated to hate, violence and discriminatory bias are being supported by these videos which became the focus of this paper’s first research question.
This paper does a great job at utilizing their three-layered approach by thoroughly explaining the methodology and providing thoughtful reflections for analyzing lexical, topical, and implicit bias. While it seemed slightly obvious that right-wing videos would display more hate than the baseline videos, it was interesting that this paper was able to prove that rage and violence was displayed in the captions while swearing words were dominant in the comments. Another finding that made sense to me, was that right-wing videos were more specific than the baseline videos. Right-wing YouTubers want to target specific topics that their audiences would be interested in, rather than broad topics covered by the baseline videos. Another finding I was interested in was the implicit bias analysis. While I am not surprised that there was a greater bias concerning Muslims in right-wing videos compared to the baseline videos, I am surprised that the captions of right-wing videos were statistically higher than the comments which held higher discriminatory bias against LGBT people.
Further Questions
- One of the future works proposed in this paper was the addition of a temporal component to their analysis. Would the temporal component in this paper’s research show correlation to recent big political events such as significant events that have occurred during the current presidency?
- What results would we find if the three-layered approach used in this paper was conducted using left-wing YouTube videos?
- How different with the results from this paper on YouTube videos from different platforms such as Twitter or Facebook posts of right-wing outlets?
