Pressing play on politics: Quantitative description of YouTube

Munger, Kevin M., Bisbee, James, Yalcin, Omer F., Phillips, Joseph B. and Hindman, Matthew 2025. Pressing play on politics: Quantitative description of YouTube. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 5 , 006.

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Abstract

We present a large-scale quantitative analysis of anglophone politics channels on YouTube, with three distinct units of analysis: channels, comments, and videos. We demonstrate that although channels have been entering the YouTube system at a roughly constant rate since 2008, there is serious inequality in the attention received by different channels and videos. Furthermore, prolific commenters are responsible for an astonishing amount of activity: 50% of total comments are written by just over 2% of all commenters. However, the toxicity for which YouTube comments are famous tends to be more pronounced among infrequent commenters than among these super-users. Our findings have important implications for the way in which YouTube viewers interpret what they see as representative of public opinion as a whole.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Cardiff Law & Politics Schools > Department of Politics and International Relations (POLIR) Research Institutes & Centres > Wales Governance Centre (WGCES)
ISSN:	2673-8813
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 February 2025
Date of Acceptance:	16 February 2025
Last Modified:	19 Mar 2025 15:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176263

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