YouTube users tend to lead to radicalization?

As pointed out by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, YouTube has the effect of radicalizing users into extreme conservatism (alt-right). Found that there is. The findings were presented at the conference ACM FAT 2020 in Barcelona.

The point that YouTube leads to radicalization has been pointed out in various places, including Twopack, but no quantitative evidence has been found so far. The research team conducted a large-scale investigation into the radical through 349,925 videos posted on 349 channels.

The research team first classified images into four categories: Media, Altright, IDW (Intellectual Dark Web), and Altright. Based on the hypothesis that YouTube is a pipeline leading to radicalization, Altright and IDW channels should serve as entrances to Altright channels. As a result of analyzing 72 million opinions, the research team confirmed that Altright and IDW channels consist of similar user bases, while media do not overlap by user class.

In addition, users who previously watched Altlite and IDW channels see Altlite channels, so users tend to migrate from mild content to extreme content.

Along with this, the research team also investigated the YouTube recommendation algorithm. As a result, during the investigation period from May to July 2019, the Altlite channel was easily accessible from the IDW channel, and the Altright channel was only accessible through recommendation. From these results, the research team concluded that there is certainly a radical effect of YouTube users.

Of course, the research team revealed that it is difficult to make an absolute claim that YouTube is the only blame for the question of whether there is evidence that such radicalization is caused by YouTube, not by external sites. Related information can be found here .