YouTube
Countering violent extremism using social media and preventing implementable strategies for Bangladesh
September 18, 2023Globally, more than 85% of youth use social media daily in the medium of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc., which is more than 70% for Bangladesh. The young population of Bangladesh is rapidly embracing social media through the internet and afflicted with the malaise of countering violent extremism (CVE), often through Facebook. Given the increasing connectedness ...
Social media corporations as actors of counter-terrorism
September 18, 2023This article discusses the role of giant social media corporations Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter in counter-terrorism and countering violent extremisms (CT/CVEs). Based on a qualitative investigation mobilizing corporate communications as well as a collection of interviews with European stakeholders, it argues that these firms have become actors in this policy area of what is ...
Salafist Third Spaces and Hybridic Purity on YouTube
September 18, 2023This case study applies aspects of third space theory (; ) to investigate the activism on the YouTube channel Salafimedia UK (smuk) and their claim to be the self-proscribed “truest” and “purest” Islamic sect. This chapter introduces the somewhat paradoxical concept of “hybridic purity” – an emerging ideology that seeks to encompass pre-modern Islamic practices ...
Recommender systems and the amplification of extremist content
September 18, 2023Policymakers have recently expressed concerns over the role of recommendation algorithms and their role in forming “filter bubbles”. This is a particularly prescient concern in the context of extremist content online; these algorithms may promote extremist content at the expense of more moderate voices. In this article, we make two contributions to this debate. Firstly, ...
YouTube Regrets: A crowdsourced investigation into YouTube’s recommendation algorithm
September 18, 2023Faced with YouTube’s continuous refusal to engage, Mozilla built a browser extension, RegretsReporter, that allows people to donate data about the YouTube videos they regret watching on the platform. Through one of the biggest crowdsourced investigations into YouTube, we’ve uncovered new information that warrants urgent attention and action from lawmakers and the public. We now ...
The Fission of the Forbidden: The Popularity of Video Content in an Online Right-Wing Extremist Environment
September 18, 2023Video platforms such as YouTube provide an environment where the blurred duality between content dissemination and creation facilitates the generation of social networks. Research into online violent extremist environments has often noted the prominence of video-sharing platforms as a means of distributing propaganda and cultivating social networks for purposes of recruitment. This paper draws from ...
Hate, Obscenity, and Insults: Measuring the Exposure of Children to Inappropriate Comments in YouTube
September 18, 2023Social media has become an essential part of the daily routines of children and adolescents. Moreover, enormous efforts have been made to ensure the psychological and emotional well-being of young users as well as their safety when interacting with various social media platforms. In this paper, we investigate the exposure of those users to inappropriate ...
Freedom of Speech, the War on Terror, and What’s YouTube Got to Do with It: American Censorship during Times of Military Conflict
September 18, 2023Freedom of Speech, the War on Terror, and What’s YouTube Got to Do with It: American Censorship during Times of Military Conflict ...
Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube
September 18, 2023Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s outsize influence has sparked concerns that its recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data of individuals’ ...
Online influence, offline violence: language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally
September 18, 2023The media frequently describes the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally as a turning point for the alt-right and white supremacist movements. Social movement theory suggests that the media attention and public discourse concerning the rally may have engendered changes in social identity performance and visibility of the alt-right, but this has yet to be ...