Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube
Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube
is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in
the world. Recently, YouTube's outsize influence has sparked concerns that its
recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing
content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data
of individuals' browsing behavior spanning January 2016 through December 2019.
Consistent with previous work, we find that political news content accounts for
a relatively small fraction (11%) of consumption on YouTube, and is dominated
by mainstream and largely centrist sources. However, we also find evidence for
a small but growing "echo chamber" of far-right content consumption. Users in
this community show higher engagement and greater "stickiness" than users who
consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an
increasing fraction of these users' overall online news consumption. Finally,
while the size, intensity, and growth of this echo chamber present real
concerns, we find no evidence that they are caused by YouTube recommendations.
Rather, consumption of radical content on YouTube appears to reflect broader
patterns of news consumption across the web. Our results emphasize the
importance of measuring consumption directly rather than inferring it from
recommendations.
Authors
Homa Hosseinmardi, Amir Ghasemian, Aaron Clauset, David M. Rothschild, Markus Mobius, Duncan J. Watts