Title: Analyzing Right-wing YouTube Channels: Hate, Violence, and Discrimination
Summary:
The purpose of the study was to determine ifhateful vocabulary, violent content and discriminatory biases more, less, or equally prevalent in right-wing channels and whether or not video commenters more, less or equally aggravated than video hosts. The research was conducted over a set of data collected on right wing video channels and baseline videos. They investigated the presence of hateful speech by using three-layer approach (lexicon, topics, and implicit bias) over users’ comments and video content. Based on multiple findings, the study provided the following conclusions about Right-wing channels:
- Right-wing channels tend to contain a higher degree of words from “negative” semantic fields
- raise more topics related to war and terrorism
- demonstrate more discriminatory bias against Muslims (in videos) and towards LGBT people
Reflection
YouTube has changed the way we acquire and spread information in our society. Everyone has now easy access to start a podcast or channel to spread information. This also brings a lot of challenges and one of them is the spread of heat speech specially from Right-wing channels. The 2016 election is good example for this. I believe that this study provided a step forward in tackling this problem. Even though, I am really impressed by their findings and conclusion, I am not surprised. Nevertheless, their research gives a great insight for future studies. Considering their findings and summarization, we can reflect on different aspects and their implications.
Part 1: From their findings that impressed me the most is that Right-wing channels tended to contain more “negative” semantics fields. It is important to know what the motive behind it is.
Questions and further research
- Can we determine the standard a video based on users’ activity or account information? This will help us to perfectly identify hate-based videos.
- What would be the result if we do the same research on other social media platforms like twitter and Facebook. I believe that conducting a research across different platforms would give insights about the commonality of this type of videos.
Part 2: that stack out of me after reading the study is that do Right wing channels differ in terms of their approach? Do they change their approach time to time or stay consistent? I believe that doing more research on multiple Right winged channels on YouTube will help us to solve this problem.
