# Examining the Role of YouTube Production and Consumption Dynamics on the Formation of Extreme Ideologies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08313/) (2019)
- [Algorithmic Amplification of Politics on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11010/) (2021)
- [Algorithmic Extremism: Examining YouTube's Rabbit Hole of Radicalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11211/) (2019)
- [Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12843/) (2020)
- [YouTube, The Great Radicalizer? Auditing and Mitigating Ideological Biases in YouTube Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10666/) (2022)
- [Causally estimating the effect of YouTube's recommender system using counterfactual bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10398/) (2023)
- [The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding Threatening Language Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04798/) (2020)
- [The Amplification Paradox in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11225/) (2023)
- [To Act or React: Investigating Proactive Strategies For Online Community Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11932/) (2019)
- [Uncovering the Interaction Equation: Quantifying the Effect of User Interactions on Social Media Homepage Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07227/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The relationship between content production and consumption on algorithm-driven platforms like YouTube plays a critical role in shaping ideological behaviors. While prior work has largely focused on user behavior and algorithmic recommendations, the interplay between what is produced and what gets consumed, and its role in ideological shifts remains understudied. In this paper, we present a longitudinal, mixed-methods analysis combining one year of YouTube watch history with two waves of ideological surveys from 1,100 U.S. participants. We identify users who exhibited significant shifts toward more extreme ideologies and compare their content consumption and the production patterns of YouTube channels they engaged with to ideologically stable users. Our findings show that users who became more extreme consumed have different consumption habits from those who do not. This gets amplified by the fact that channels favored by users with extreme ideologies also have a higher affinity to produce content with a higher anger, grievance and other such markers. Lastly, using time series analysis, we examine whether content producers are the primary drivers of consumption behavior or merely responding to user demand.