Watching Politics: Analysing News and Political YouTube Consumption in the US

• In Event: Conspiracy Theories, Platforms, and Elections

Abstract

YouTube is one of the most important online information sources in everyday life for Internet users worldwide. Previous research has focused on the adoption and use of YouTube for entertainment or leisure. However, as an increasing amount of political content becomes available on the platform, YouTube has also become an important channel for seeking information about news and politics. This paper combines users’ behavioral data of daily web visits to YouTube videos, where the YouTube visits (N unique videos = 215,977) were extracted from all website visits between Feb 2019 to June 2019 from a representative sample of US internet users, combined with survey data on these users’ media trust, political attitudes, and demographics (N US panelists = 1510). The paper will address the following research questions: How do Americans consume news and political information on YouTube? Is there a link between support for populist politicians and the consumption of political YouTube? How is news and political information framed on YouTube? Are there similarities and differences across different types of news and politics YouTube channels? Answers to these questions will shed light on video-formatted political information from a user-centric perspective and contribute to the understanding of public attention on social media platforms such as YouTube.
Unlike, for example, Facebook and Twitter, YouTube has received comparatively little scholarly attention (but see Burgess and Green 2018), and political videos on YouTube even less so. The studies that have examined YouTube and politics have mainly focused on the question of whether YouTube somehow reinforces certain political views; whether by polarizing viewers or separating them into filter bubbles or algorithmic bolstering of radical or extreme political ideas and the like. Lewis (2020) closely examined the content of three political YouTubers – she calls them ‘micro-celebrities’ – finding them opposed to the content of what they see as biased mainstream media. But she notes that these micro-celebrity influencers can also be found among those espousing progressive (feminist, anti-racist, sexual identity) causes. Moeller et al. (2019) focused on the comments related to political and entertainment YouTube videos and also likes and replies, finding a number of differences between the two types and between them, including the positive or negative nature of responses. While existing empirical research on political YouTube has suggested various kinds of shaping of political content on the social media platform, there is a gap in literature examining political YouTube from a user-centric perspective, showing how users consume political information on the platform on a daily basis.
This paper is part of a larger project with webtracking data combined with surveys from six countries. In this paper, we focus on news and politics YouTube web visits in the US and triangulate the data with survey variables. We used YouTube's data API to crawl metadata of all news and politics videos watched by American panelists, with ‘news and politics’ videos identified by YouTube’s own categorization scheme. American panelists’ web visits to political YouTube accounted for 4.34% of the US YouTube visits dataset.
Our first research question sought the link between political attitudes, media trust, demographics and visits to political YouTube videos. Binomial logistic regression suggest that age, instead of political attitudes, accounts for whether or not users consume political YouTube videos. Younger generation users in the US are more likely to consume political information on YouTube than older generations. Nevertheless, when it comes to the frequency of watching political YouTube videos, right-leaning voters in the US are more likely than other voters to consume a higher number of political YouTube videos. Media trust is not a significant factor behind visits to political YouTube or the frequency of consuming political YouTube content. In the second part of the paper, we examined media agendas in political YouTube videos using LDA topic modelling techniques to identify underlying topics from political YouTube titles. We trained multiple LDA models and selected ten as the optimal number of topics with the highest coherence score among all models. The visualisation of topic modelling results of the video titles shows that there are ten topics identified in the political YouTube videos consumed by American panelists. We found topical differences across different types of YouTube channels, with the main differences between legacy news media (for example, CNN, BBC) and independent news channels (for example, The Young Turks).

Authors

• Pu Yan, Peking University

• Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute