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We’ve all seen it it happens: Watch a video on Youtube and your recommendations change, as if Google’s algorithms think the subject of the video is the passion of your life. All of a sudden, all the recommended videos that are presented to you — and probably a lot of ads — are about the topic.
For the most part, the results are comical. But it has been a continuous stream of stories knowing how the process has radicalized people, sending rabbit holes deeper and deeper, until all their perspectives have been dominated by marginal ideas and conspiracy theories.
A new study published on Monday examines whether these stories indicate a greater trend or are just a collection of anecdotes. While the data cannot rule out the presence of online radicalization, they certainly suggest that this is not the most common experience. Instead, it seems that limited ideas are part of a larger community of self-empowerment.
Big Data
Usually, the challenge of doing such a study is to get people to get data about their video viewing habits without knowing these people, and to change their behavior accordingly. The researchers worked on this topic by obtaining data from Nielsen, which only keeps track of what people are seeing. People allow Nielsen to follow his habits and anonymize the data obtained by the company. For this study, the researchers obtained data from more than 300,000 viewers, collectively viewing more than 21 million videos on Youtube from 2016 to the end of 2019.
Most of these videos had nothing to do with politics, so the authors used literature to identify a wide range of channels that previous studies had labeled according to their political leanings, from the extreme left to the centrist and right. To this list, researchers added a category they called “anti-awakening”. Although not always overt policies, a growing collection of channels focuses on “opposing progressive social justice movements”. While these channels tend to align with the right interests, the ideas are often not presented by the video hosts in this way.
All in all, the channels classified by the researchers (a little over 1,000 of them) accounted for only 3.3% of all video views during that period. And those who saw it continued with only one type of content; If you started seeing the content on the left in 2016, you were likely to see it when the exam period ended in 2020. In 2020, perhaps as a product of the years of conflict in Trump.
(The exception to this is extreme left-wing content, which was so rarely seen that in many cases it was impossible to select statistically significant trends.)
All types of off-margin content also experienced growth during this period, both in terms of the audience and the amount of time they spent watching these videos on the channels (the exception is left-wing and far-right content). This finding suggests that at least some trends reflect the increasing use of YouTube as a substitute for more traditional media.
Trends
Since most viewers viewed only one type of content, the easiest thing to do is to think that they form different groups. The researchers tracked the number of people in each group, as well as the time they spent watching the videos over a four-year period.
During this time, the main left was as large as the other groups together; then came the centrists. The main right and anti-woke started the period at the same level as the far right. But they all showed different tendencies. The number of viewers on the far right was flat, but the time spent watching videos increased. In contrast, the number of viewers on the main right increased, but the time spent watching was not compared to that of the far right.
Opponents of the awakening showed the highest growth rate of any group. At the end of the period, they spent more time watching videos than the centrists, even though they still had a smaller population.
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