Pressing play on politics : quantitative description of YouTube

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. The toxicity for which YouTube comments are famous tends to be more pronounced among these super-users than among infrequent commenters. Our findings have important implications for the way in which YouTube viewers interpret what they see as representative of public opinion.