Examining the Role of YouTube Production and Consumption Dynamics on the Formation of Extreme Ideologies

TL;DR

This study investigates how YouTube content production and consumption dynamics influence the development of extreme ideologies, revealing that consumption habits and content features contribute to ideological shifts.

Contribution

It provides a longitudinal mixed-methods analysis linking content consumption, production patterns, and ideological change on YouTube, highlighting the role of content features and producer-response dynamics.

Findings

Users with extreme ideologies consume different content patterns.

Channels favored by extremists produce more anger and grievance.

Content producers respond to user demand rather than drive consumption.

Abstract

The relationship between content production and consumption on algorithm-driven platforms like YouTube plays a critical role in shaping ideological behaviors. While prior work has largely focused on user behavior and algorithmic recommendations, the interplay between what is produced and what gets consumed, and its role in ideological shifts remains understudied. In this paper, we present a longitudinal, mixed-methods analysis combining one year of YouTube watch history with two waves of ideological surveys from 1,100 U.S. participants. We identify users who exhibited significant shifts toward more extreme ideologies and compare their content consumption and the production patterns of YouTube channels they engaged with to ideologically stable users. Our findings show that users who became more extreme consumed have different consumption habits from those who do not. This gets amplified by the fact that channels favored by users with extreme ideologies also have a higher affinity to produce content with a higher anger, grievance and other such markers. Lastly, using time series analysis, we examine whether content producers are the primary drivers of consumption behavior or merely responding to user demand.