# Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.12843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12843/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Accuracy and Political Bias of News Source Credibility Ratings by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00228/) (2023)
- [A Novel BERT-based Classifier to Detect Political Leaning of YouTube Videos based on their Titles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04261/) (2024)
- [Comfort Foods and Community Connectedness: Investigating Diet Change during COVID-19 Using YouTube Videos on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11398/) (2023)
- [Reducing Exposure to Harmful Content via Graph Rewiring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07930/) (2023)
- [Uncovering the Deep Filter Bubble: Narrow Exposure in Short-Video Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04511/) (2024)
- ["Whose Side Are You On?" Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20797/) (2025)
- [An influencer-based approach to understanding radical right viral tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07588/) (2021)
- [Moral consensus and divergence in partisan language use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09618/) (2023)
- [Modeling Political Orientation of Social Media Posts: An Extended Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12323/) (2023)
- [When or What? Understanding Consumer Engagement on Digital Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10474/) (2025)
- [Examining the Role of YouTube Production and Consumption Dynamics on the Formation of Extreme Ideologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08049/) (2026)
- [LLM-Assisted Reranking to Operationalize Nuanced Objectives in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02883/) (2026)
- [Why Does Misinformation Propagate Faster? An Algorithmic Perspective on X](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28947/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.