Analyzing Right-wing YouTube Channels: Hate, Violence and Discrimination

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 7,000 videos and 17 million comments on right-wing YouTube channels, revealing higher negativity, focus on war and terrorism, and discriminatory biases against Muslims and LGBT individuals.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-layered analysis approach to compare right-wing YouTube content and comments with baseline data, uncovering specific biases and thematic differences.

Findings

Higher use of negative words in right-wing channels

More topics related to war and terrorism

Greater discriminatory bias against Muslims and LGBT

Abstract

As of 2018, YouTube, the major online video sharing website, hosts multiple channels promoting right-wing content. In this paper, we observe issues related to hate, violence and discriminatory bias in a dataset containing more than 7,000 videos and 17 million comments. We investigate similarities and differences between users' comments and video content in a selection of right-wing channels and compare it to a baseline set using a three-layered approach, in which we analyze (a) lexicon, (b) topics and (c) implicit biases present in the texts. Among other results, our analyses show that right-wing channels tend to (a) contain a higher degree of words from "negative" semantic fields, (b) raise more topics related to war and terrorism, and (c) demonstrate more discriminatory bias against Muslims (in videos) and towards LGBT people (in comments). Our findings shed light not only into the collective conduct of the YouTube community promoting and consuming right-wing content, but also into the general behavior of YouTube users.