YouNICon: YouTube's CommuNIty of Conspiracy Videos

TL;DR

This paper introduces YOUNICON, a comprehensive dataset of YouTube conspiracy videos, to facilitate research on conspiracy theory detection, classification, and understanding community interactions.

Contribution

It provides a large, curated dataset of conspiracy videos from suspicious channels, enabling new research in conspiracy theory detection and analysis on YouTube.

Findings

Dataset enables conspiracy detection research

Supports classification of conspiracy topics

Facilitates study of community interactions

Abstract

Conspiracy theories are widely propagated on social media. Among various social media services, YouTube is one of the most influential sources of news and entertainment. This paper seeks to develop a dataset, YOUNICON, to enable researchers to perform conspiracy theory detection as well as classification of videos with conspiracy theories into different topics. YOUNICON is a dataset with a large collection of videos from suspicious channels that were identified to contain conspiracy theories in a previous study (Ledwich and Zaitsev 2020). Overall, YOUNICON will enable researchers to study trends in conspiracy theories and understand how individuals can interact with the conspiracy theory producing community or channel. Our data is available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7466262.