Conspiracy theories thrive on YouTube, new study
Conversational strategies used in sample comments on YouTube.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, YouTube introduced new policies and guidelines aimed at limiting the spread of medical misinformation about the virus on the platform.
But the study found the comments feature remains relatively unmoderated and has low barriers to entry for posting publicly, with many posts violating the platform’s rules, for example, comments that proposed vaccines are used for mass sterilisation or to insert microchips into recipients.
The researchers studied a dataset of 38,564 YouTube comments drawn from three Covid-19-related videos posted by news media organisations Fox News, Vox, and China Global Television Network. Each video featured Bill Gates and, at the time of data extraction, had between 13,000–14,500 comments posted between April 5, 2020, and March 2, 2021.
Through topic modelling and qualitative content analysis, the study found the comments for each video to be heavily dominated by conspiratorial statements.
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from University of Sydney can be found here.
