Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube

Manoel Horta Ribeiro · Raphael Ottoni · Robert West · Virgilio A. F. Almeida · Wagner Meira

577 citations0/0 files storedACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT)

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Misinformation and Its Impacts Populism, Right-Wing Movements Social Media and Politics

Abstract

Non-profits, as well as the media, have hypothesized the existence of a radicalization pipeline on YouTube, claiming that users systematically progress towards more extreme content on the platform. Yet, there is to date no substantial quantitative evidence of this alleged pipeline. To close this gap, we conduct a large-scale audit of user radicalization on YouTube. We analyze 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels, which we broadly classified into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual Dark Web (I.D.W.), and the Alt-right. According to the aforementioned radicalization hypothesis, channels in the I.D.W. and the Alt-lite serve as gateways to fringe far-right ideology, here represented by Alt-right channels. Processing 72M+ comments, we show that the three channel types indeed increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. content in the past. We also probe YouTube's recommendation algorithm, looking at more than 2M video and channel recommendations between May/July 2019. We find that Alt-lite content is easily reachable from I.D.W. channels, while Alt-right videos are reachable only through channel recommendations. Overall, we paint a comprehensive picture of user radicalization on YouTube.

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References

2008Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism 2018Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018 2014Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites 2018Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube 2014Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes

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2023Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media 2025Social media and the spread of misinformation: infectious and a threat to public health 2020Algorithmic extremism: Examining YouTube's rabbit hole of radicalization 2020Contemporary Social Movements in a Hybrid Media Environment 2024Human-AI coevolution 2022Reliance on metrics is a fundamental challenge for AI 2020Toward an End-to-End Sociology of 21st-Century Machine Learning 2022Far-Right Online Radicalization: A Review of the Literature

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