Study of YouTube Comments Finds Evidence of Radicalization Effect

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Research presented at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona today supports the notion that YouTube's platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies. The study, carried out by researchers at Switzerland's Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, found evidence that users who engaged with a middle ground of extreme right-wing content migrated to commenting on the most fringe far-right content. Their paper, called "Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube," details a large-scale study of YouTube looking for traces of evidence -- in likes, comments and views -- that certain right-leaning YouTube communities are acting as gateways to fringe far-right ideologies. Per the paper, they analyzed 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels -- broadly classifying the videos into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) and the Alt-right -- and using user comments as a "good enough" proxy for radicalization (their data set included 72 million comments). The findings suggest a pipeline effect over a number of years where users who started out commenting on alt-lite/IDW YouTube content shifted to commenting on extreme far-right content on the platform over time. The rate of overlap between consumers of Media content and the alt-right was found to be far lower. "The researchers were unable to determine the exact mechanism involved in migrating YouTube users from consuming 'alt lite' politics to engaging with the most fringe and extreme far-right ideologies -- citing a couple of key challenges on that front: Limited access to recommendation data; and the study not taking into account personalization (which can affect a user's recommendations on YouTube)," reports TechCrunch. "But even without personalization, they say they were 'still able to find a path in which users could find extreme content from large media channels.'"

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