ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Article
- Echo chambers can emerge without algorithmic personalization or a preference for homogeneity.PloS one · 2026Article
- DomainDemo: a dataset of domain-sharing activities among different demographic groups on Twitter.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Engagement, user satisfaction, and the amplification of divisive content on social media.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Short-term exposure to filter-bubble recommendation systems has limited polarization effects: Naturalistic experiments on YouTube.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Nudging recommendation algorithms increases news consumption and diversity on YouTube.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Current engagement with unreliable sites from web search driven by navigational search.Science advances · 2024Article
- Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Incentivizing news consumption on social media platforms using large language models and realistic bot accounts.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation.Nature · 2024Review
- Causally estimating the effect of YouTube's recommender system using counterfactual bots.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Auditing YouTube's recommendation system for ideologically congenial, extreme, and problematic recommendations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Social media, extremism, and radicalization.Science advances · 2023Review
- Subscriptions and external links help drive resentful users to alternative and extremist YouTube channels.Science advances · 2023Article
- Reducing political polarization in the United States with a mobile chat platform.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Article
- Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search.Nature · 2023Article
- Offline events and online hate.PloS one · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although it is under-studied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube's scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical "anti-woke" channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of "anti-woke" content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.