{"id":445,"date":"2019-02-07T05:39:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T05:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/?p=445"},"modified":"2019-02-07T05:39:52","modified_gmt":"2019-02-07T05:39:52","slug":"reading-reflection-4-2-6-2019-jonathan-alexander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/2019\/02\/07\/reading-reflection-4-2-6-2019-jonathan-alexander\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Reflection 4 &#8211; 2\/6\/2019 &#8211; Jonathan Alexander"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Overview<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This paper analyses a selection of right-wing YouTube\nchannels aiming to ascertain if the presence of hateful vocabulary, violent\ncontent and discriminatory biases are accentuated more in right-wing channels\nand if commentators are more or less exacerbated than videos hosts. The authors\nfirst selected a sample of YouTube channels they identified as right-wing and a\nbaseline selection of the top ten YouTube channels in the news and politics\ncategory. The analyzed the comments of the videos and the videos themselves for\nhate, violence, and bias using a threefold method of lexical, topic, and\nimplicit bias analysis. From their analysis and data, the authors made several\nconclusions: that right-wing channel are more specific in their content, have a\nnegative bias towards Muslims, and that commenters on right-wing YouTube\nchannels are more exacerbated than the hosts of the videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Reflection<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The paper focuses on \u201cright-wing\u201d content on\nYouTube. Their definition of right-wing seems to be based off of their personal\nopinions and connection InfoWars, \u201ca right-wing news site founded by\u2026\u201d Their definition\nseems lacking to me and the view of their paper seems one sided. They also state,\n\u201cIt is valuable to investigate whether behaviors connected to hate, violence,\nand discriminatory bias come into sight in right-wing videos\u201d. The authors do\nnot offer what value they are talking about with this \u201cvalue\u201d or what\nconclusions they look to draw. I would instead choose to <strong>inquire as to the presence of hate, violence, and discriminatory bias\nin partisan YouTube channels<\/strong>.<\/li><li>The paper creates its sample of right-wing\nYouTube channels by examining channels connected to \u201cAlex Jones\u201d which the\nauthors said they \u201cvisited and confirmed that, according to our understanding,\nall of them published mainly right \u2013wing content\u201d. In total, the researchers\ncollected 13 YouTube channels. I think this method of sample selection introduces\na huge amount of bias to the study as it relies on the researchers opinions and\nverification of what is right-wing. <\/li><li>The researchers lexical analysis made use of\nsemantic fields to categorize words in the caption or comments as positive or\nnegative. They selected a collection of categories and grouped them as positive\nor negative, if a word fit a semantic category in the positive or negative\ngrouping it added towards the corresponding word count for that source. The researchers\nseemed to choose far more categories for the negative category than for the\npositive category and it seems possible that this may have skewed their\nresults. From 194 total categories to choose from the researchers chose \u201c15\ncategories related to hate violence, discrimination and negative feelings, and\n(b) 5 categories related to positive matters in general\u201d It seems to me that\nthey cherry picked these categories to support what they are trying to showcase\nin this article instead of using a representative sampling of semantic fields. I\nthink a <strong>lexical analysis of a wide\nvariety of political news YouTube channels using all of the Empath semantic\nfield categories could provide insight into implicit bias or sentiments embedded\nin our political process.\u201d<\/strong><\/li><li>The authors point out that some of the top\nranked topics for right-wing videos had to do with war and terrorism which the\nauthors categorizes as negative. However, these issues are hallmarks of the\nright-wing platform and their very presence does not indicate hate, violence,\nor bias. Instead I think such <strong>topic\nanalysis across all news sources could give some insight into the use of fear\nin media to persuade, influence, or simply sell more media.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overview This paper analyses a selection of right-wing YouTube channels aiming to ascertain if the presence of hateful vocabulary, violent content and discriminatory biases are accentuated more in right-wing channels and if commentators are more or less exacerbated than videos hosts. The authors first selected a sample of YouTube channels they identified as right-wing and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":256,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/256"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs4984spring19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}