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Study shows viewership of harmful content concentrated among a small group of users:

As the second most popular social media platform in the world, YouTube frequently attracts criticism. In particular, critics argue that its algorithmic recommendations facilitate radicalization and extremism by sending users down "rabbit holes" of harmful content.

According to a new study published in Science Advances, however, exposure to alternative and extremist video channels on YouTube is not driven by recommendations. Instead, most consumption of these channels on the platform can be attributed to a small group of users high in gender and racial resentment and who subscribe to these channels and follow links to their videos.

The study authors caution that these findings do not exonerate the platform. "YouTube's algorithms may not be recommending alternative and extremist content to nonsubscribers very often, but they are nonetheless hosting it for free and funneling it to subscribers in ways that are of great concern," says co-author Brendan Nyhan, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor at Dartmouth.

[...] In 2019, YouTube announced that changes to its algorithms had reduced watch time of harmful content by 50%, with a 70% decline in watch time by nonsubscribers. These reports had not been independently verified, so the research team set out to determine who is watching this type of content and evaluate what recommendations are offered by YouTube's algorithm.

[...] Given the challenges of trying to characterize the content of every single video viewed, the researchers focused on the type of YouTube channels people watched. They compiled lists of channels that had been identified as alternative or extreme by journalists and academics and then examined how often a participant visited videos from those channels.

[...] A majority of viewers of the potentially harmful channels were subscribers to the type of channel in question: 61% subscribers for alternative channels and 55% for extremist channels. Almost all subscribed either to the channel in question or another one like it: 93% for alternative channels and 85% for extremist channels.

Viewing time data showed that a tiny percentage of people were responsible for most of the time participants spent watching potentially harmful channels. Specifically, 1.7% of participants were responsible for 80% of time spent on alternative channels while only 0.6% of participants were responsible for 80% of the time spent on extremist channels.

The researchers also found that people who scored high in hostile sexism and racial resentment were more likely to visit videos from alternative and extremist channels.

[...] "What really stands out is the correlation between content subscribers' prior levels of hostile sexism and more time spent watching videos from alternative and extremist channels," says Nyhan. "We interpret that relationship as suggesting that people are seeking this content out."

By contrast, the researchers found that recommendations to alternative and extremist channel videos were very rare and that "rabbit hole"-type events were only observed a handful of times during the study period.

Journal Reference:
Annie Y. Chen, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, et al., Subscriptions and external links help drive resentful users to alternative and extremist YouTube channels, Sci. Adv., Vol. 9, No. 35 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8080

Original Submission