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More evidence of YouTube rightwing radicalization. In a study of >79 million YouTube comments, @manoelribeiro et. al. shows that a high % of people who now comment on Alt-Right videos used to comment exclusively on IDW or Alt-lite videos.
arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313
arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313
@manoelribeiro These are the key figures, which show what % of Alt-Right commenters in a given year were commenting on Alt-lite or IDW vids (but not Alt-Right ones) the previous year. You can see in Fig. 4 that Alt-lite is a bigger vector than the IDW, but viewers of both were most vulnerable.
@manoelribeiro For example, about 40% of people who commented on Alt-Right videos in 2018 were commenting only on IDW or Alt-lite videos in previous years. And in case you were wondering, these comments were overwhelmingly positive or neutral. Of 900 randomly sampled, only 5 were critical.
@manoelribeiro Moreover, the authors argue that the three communities increasingly share an overlapping audience of YouTube commenters. So while IDW has historically represented a smaller pipeline to the Alt-Right, this is changing.
@manoelribeiro You can read the paper at the link above. See also this thread from one of the authors summarizing their findings.
Just to clear up a potential confusion, I mean here that 40% of Alt-Right commenters in 2018 started out in a previous year (between 2012 and 2017) commenting solely on Alt-lite or IDW videos.
Yes, this doesn’t tell us the probability thar an Alt-lite/IDW commenter will be radicalized. Only that of those radicalized, a high % started out commenting on Alt-lite or IDW videos. An important point to keep in mind.
Since a lot of IDW folks are getting their backs up about this, I want to be clear: This study does NOT say that IDW figures/supporters are sympathetic to the Alt-Right. It also does NOT say that a large % of IDW supporters have or will migrate to the Alt-Right.
However...
However...
...What it IS saying is that if you comment on Alt-Right videos now, chances are good that you used to (or still do) comment on IDW videos as well. And moreover, that YouTube's recommendation algorithm probably directed you there, as the links are quite strong.
That's it. There's no reason to get all defensive. But there's also no reason to dismiss the study as meaningless. If you're an ardent fan of the IDW, you should be asking yourself some hard questions right now about why the Alt-Right audience overlaps so heavily with your own.
