{"id":710118,"date":"2020-01-30T19:03:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T00:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=710118"},"modified":"2020-01-30T19:03:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T00:03:00","slug":"study-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=710118","title":{"rendered":"Study of YouTube Comments Finds Evidence of Radicalization Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Research presented at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona today supports the notion that YouTube&#8217;s platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies. The study, carried out by researchers at Switzerland&#8217;s Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, found evidence that users who engaged with a middle ground of extreme right-wing content migrated to commenting on the most fringe far-right content.<\/p>\n<p>Their paper, called &#8220;Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube,&#8221; details a large-scale study of YouTube looking for traces of evidence &#8212; in likes, comments and views &#8212; that certain right-leaning YouTube communities are acting as gateways to fringe far-right ideologies. Per the paper, they analyzed 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels &#8212; broadly classifying the videos into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) and the Alt-right &#8212; and using user comments as a &#8220;good enough&#8221; proxy for radicalization (their data set included 72 million comments). The findings suggest a pipeline effect over a number of years where users who started out commenting on alt-lite\/IDW YouTube content shifted to commenting on extreme far-right content on the platform over time. The rate of overlap between consumers of Media content and the alt-right was found to be far lower. &#8220;The researchers were unable to determine the exact mechanism involved in migrating YouTube users from consuming &#8216;alt lite&#8217; politics to engaging with the most fringe and extreme far-right ideologies &#8212; citing a couple of key challenges on that front: Limited access to recommendation data; and the study not taking into account personalization (which can affect a user&#8217;s recommendations on YouTube),&#8221; reports TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But even without personalization, they say they were &#8216;still able to find a path in which users could find extreme content from large media channels.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<div class=\"share_submission\">\n<a class=\"slashpop\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/home?status=Study+of+YouTube+Comments+Finds+Evidence+of+Radicalization+Effect%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2OcGkcc\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/twitter_icon_large-1190.png\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<a class=\"slashpop\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F20%2F01%2F30%2F227206%2Fstudy-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/facebook_icon_large-588.png\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a class=\"nobg\" href=\"http:\/\/plus.google.com\/share?url=https:\/\/news.slashdot.org\/story\/20\/01\/30\/227206\/study-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect?utm_source=slashdot&amp;utm_medium=googleplus\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/gplus-16-604.png\" alt=\"Share on Google+\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/news.slashdot.org\/story\/20\/01\/30\/227206\/study-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&amp;utm_medium=feed\">Read more of this story<\/a> at Slashdot.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" alt=\"\" \/>&#013;<br \/>\n&#013;<br \/>\nSource: Slashdot &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/Slashdot\/~3\/aQoMhR40lQg\/study-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Study of YouTube Comments Finds Evidence of Radicalization Effect<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Research presented at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona today supports the notion that YouTube&#8217;s platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies. The study, carried &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=710118\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":710119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,110],"tags":[100],"class_list":["post-710118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slashdot","category-unfiltered-rss","tag-slashdot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=710118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/710119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=710118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=710118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=710118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}