Related papers: Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube
On July 1, 2025, YouTube retired its decade-long public "Trending" pages, ending platform-curated, non-personalized video discovery. The Trending list had long served as a vital lens into algorithmic influence, cultural diffusion, and…
Millions of people use platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other mass media. Due to the accessibility of these platforms, they are often used to establish a narrative, conduct propaganda, and disseminate misinformation. This…
Content on Twitter's home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There's been…
Video-sharing social media platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, implement content moderation policies aimed at reducing exposure to harmful videos among minor users. As video has become the dominant and most immersive form of…
As a leading online platform with a vast global audience, YouTube's extensive reach also makes it susceptible to hosting harmful content, including disinformation and conspiracy theories. This study explores the use of open-weight Large…
Recommender systems typically suggest to users content similar to what they consumed in the past. If a user happens to be exposed to strongly polarized content, she might subsequently receive recommendations which may steer her towards more…
Recommendation algorithms (RS) used by social media, like YouTube, significantly shape our information consumption across various domains, especially in healthcare. Hence, algorithmic auditing becomes crucial to uncover their potential bias…
Social media's role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the dissemination of online hate, mis- and disinformation, and real-world violence. While the majority of…
The growing popularity of short-form video content, such as YouTube Shorts, has transformed user engagement on digital platforms, raising critical questions about the role of recommendation algorithms in shaping user experiences. These…
Personalized recommendation algorithms, like those on YouTube, significantly shape online content consumption. These systems aim to maximize engagement by learning users' preferences and aligning content accordingly but may unintentionally…
As a YouTube channel grows, each video can potentially collect enormous amounts of comments that provide direct feedback from the viewers. These comments are a major means of understanding viewer expectations and improving channel…
The increasing importance of videos as a medium for engagement, communication, and content creation makes them critical for organizations to consider for user feedback. However, sifting through vast amounts of video content on social media…
Social media provide a fertile ground where conspiracy theories and radical ideas can flourish, reach broad audiences, and sometimes lead to hate or violence beyond the online world itself. QAnon represents a notable example of a political…
Research using YouTube data often explores social and semantic dimensions of channels and videos. Typically, analyses rely on laborious manual annotation of content and content creators, often found by low-recall methods such as keyword…
This paper makes three contributions. First, via a substantial corpus of 1,419,047 comments posted on 3,161 YouTube news videos of major US cable news outlets, we analyze how users engage with LGBTQ+ news content. Our analyses focus both on…
Many online hate groups exist to disparage others based on race, gender identity, sex, or other characteristics. The accessibility of these communities allows users to join multiple types of hate groups (e.g., a racist community and a…
Like other social media websites, YouTube is not immune from the attention of spammers. In particular, evidence can be found of attempts to attract users to malicious third-party websites. As this type of spam is often associated with…
YouTube Shorts and other short-form video platforms now influence how billions engage with content, yet their recommendation systems remain largely opaque. Small shifts in promoted content can significantly impact user exposure, especially…
Climate change debates have gained increasing visibility on social media, with YouTube emerging as one of the most influential platforms for political communication. Reaching billions of users worldwide, it functions both as a news outlet…
Alas, coordinated hate attacks, or raids, are becoming increasingly common online. In a nutshell, these are perpetrated by a group of aggressors who organize and coordinate operations on a platform (e.g., 4chan) to target victims on another…