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conference paper

Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube

Ribeiro, Manoel Horta  
•
Ottoni, Raphael
•
West, Robert  
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January 1, 2020
Fat* '20: Proceedings Of The 2020 Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT)

Non-profits, as well as the media, have hypothesized the existence of a radicalization pipeline on YouTube, claiming that users systematically progress towards more extreme content on the platform. Yet, there is to date no substantial quantitative evidence of this alleged pipeline. To close this gap, we conduct a large-scale audit of user radicalization on YouTube. We analyze 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels, which we broadly classified into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual DarkWeb (I.D.W.), and the Alt-right. According to the aforementioned radicalization hypothesis, channels in the I.D.W. and the Alt-lite serve as gateways to fringe far-right ideology, here represented by Alt-right channels. Processing 72M+ comments, we show that the three channel types indeed increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. content in the past. We also probe YouTube's recommendation algorithm, looking at more than 2M video and channel recommendations between May/July 2019. We find that Alt-lite content is easily reachable from I.D.W. channels, while Alt-right videos are reachable only through channel recommendations. Overall, we paint a comprehensive picture of user radicalization on YouTube.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3351095.3372879
Web of Science ID

WOS:000620151400028

Author(s)
Ribeiro, Manoel Horta  
Ottoni, Raphael
West, Robert  
Almeida, Virgilio A. F.
Meira, Wagner, Jr.
Date Issued

2020-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Publisher place

New York

Published in
Fat* '20: Proceedings Of The 2020 Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-6936-7

Start page

131

End page

141

Subjects

Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

•

Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications

•

Ethics

•

Computer Science

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Social Sciences - Other Topics

•

radicalization

•

hate speech

•

extremism

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algorithmic auditing

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DLAB  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT)

Barcelona, SPAIN

Jan 27-30, 2020

Available on Infoscience
March 26, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/176328
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