 Thank you so much Nicky for that kind introduction and of course for the Berkman Klein Center for having me Here in this luncheon series. Sorry I'm trying to understand how that works. Honestly Just tell me if that's okay. Is that okay? Cool. Thank you. So thank you for the Berkman Klein Center for having me for Supporting my research family for like I think one and a half years now And of course for the German Research Foundation for funding my research Indeed what I'll talk about today is part of what Nicky just described from our book that I co-write with Adrienne Alfleisch from the Taiwan National University and This delves into kind of like where writing online communication happens How are they kind of like form what the structure is and indeed we do this comparatively with Germany and the US From a theoretical perspective, I'll just like go quickly through this just so you might know where I'm coming from theoretically We're coming from Yochai Bankler's perspective or theory of the network public sphere Which kind of like posits that the internet's network character emphasizes the already existing constellation of numerous connected publics Indeed the public sphere as the one thing never existed in the first place neither offline nor online However, it was always like a mixture of bigger of smaller publics some more powerful some less powerful The internet in this sense offers new actors the opportunity to voice their opinion to potentially influence public opinion and Indeed have influence on the real-life political consequences In this sense counterpublics are a specific part a specific public that are Low in power that are usually excluded by the mainstream one way or the other and that perceive themselves Excluded as well. So this is usually a double bind where they're excluded They know that they're excluded and they kind of like first go back try to form a counterpublic Where they have like their own space where they can't talk about their issues and then kind of like try to influence the more mainstream publics Counterpublics, however, and you might have heard that in this luncheon series before counterpublics This term is often used for progressive publics for publics that are oppressed Kind of like try to find their way in the mainstream publics here to be heard This is for example true for the social justice movements for the women's movements For also for the workers movements and they all try to find like to get a voice in the public discussion to get their voices heard however Counterpublics do not have to stand for progressive values This is something that goes back to Nancy Frazier who said that counterpublics indeed do not have to be like pro-democratic Values that can be anti-democratic and indeed that's how we're looking at right-wing Actors in Germany as well in the US and this is also something that has been adapted in recent years in research to kind of like make sense Of what the right wing is trying to do and kind of like to make sense of the theoretically that attempts what they're doing And how they're being dealt with What we can see when we look at the right wing and this is true more generally speaking for offline and online connections and online social Movements is that we can talk of hybrid movements Environment sorry. This is something that Andrew Chadwick has posited and this is kind of like that online and offline nowadays Are intertwined like we can't have one without the other We can't have online activism with activism without boots on the grounds technically So the goal is always to translate this selectivism as it's sometimes called to the offline world social media in this way has proven to be like a very good source and a very important tool for Actors especially for counter-public actors, but in general. This is obviously because they emphasize and contextualize Offline events they make sense of the events and I'll talk a bit about a few events and how the right-wing actors made use of social media in that regard Indeed they can Work for online as well as outward oriented communication if you're wondering what that is inward oriented communication is We speak to you are an own counter-public they try to kind of like make sense of events They kind of like use it as a training ground as Nancy Frazier put it and to kind of like have their own space where they Communicate to themselves and they try to form a collective identity. So they kind of like have this imagined community as Anderson put it Outward oriented communication is something that like counter-publics are communicating to the outside They're trying to reach the mainstream public spheres. They kind of like try to influence the public agenda However, social media can be gained as we've seen in recent years Hashtags can be captured threats discussions that can be distorted and derailed Online personas can be faked as we know with Russian trolls And this is all being done by different groups, but the right wing is very much active in this regard however, and this is also what I will talk about today Platforms can involuntarily contribute to the formation of these counter-publics and indeed to the segmentation of publics and the question is How we deal with that how we can identify that and where that happens So let's go to the right wing. So when was the last time you cared about the Dutch elections? Did you ever care about them? well this is a Google trench slide that I picked from like a few days ago and There we can see like the general worldwide attention or look like attention for elections and indeed the first thing we see is the Dutch elections then the French elections two elections that were very much like Debated or like they watch very much in the limelight due to right-wing populist parties and their prominence and The worldwide fear generally speaking that they'd actually reach government status Which they in both cases didn't do then we had the UK elections the Kenyan elections and the German elections where we already see like Okay, the attention for elections is kind of over then we had US elections and especially the Alabama elections in the end But we can see like the right wing or the interest or the fear of the right wing is very much like on people's minds Otherwise, for example, the Dutch elections no offense to my friends from the Netherlands wouldn't have been that popular in the worldwide attention So what do we know about the online right wing in general? It's gaining in popularity in the West We see that in the Netherlands. We see that in France in the US We see that in Germany and the elections were right in populist parties are very much active and trying to to be elected Indeed and this is not even touching on countries in Europe like Austria like Hungary like Poland or right wing parties are actually in government So we can see that right wing populism is very much prominent and successfully so in the West But we also see the new versions of the far right are establishing themselves Indeed for example when we talk about the alt-right when we talk about identitarians. This is all new right This course is however and although we can see this trend happening Internationally discourses of the far right are usually embedded or deeply embedded in the national context So for example in Germany the far right always has to deal with like the Hitler era as a benchmark And which is like something that defines what they talk about in what way they talk about and the assets of course deeply intertwined with slavery and what they kind of like how they deal with that and what they can like push for So these discourses are very much different embedded in national context However, right wing actors connect on an offline internationally indeed people look see how right wing actors from Germany Inter like work and what they talk about and vice versa and we see this in a bit in examples actually So what do we know about the online right wing in the United States? Well, we know that it's mostly detached from the conservative mainstream That is something that we can generally say this might have changed a little bit in recent like in the last year potentially However, not that much We still have a very like online and offline the right wing is very much fragmented in itself It's kind of like not connected to the mainstream generally speaking and if we look at crime rates in the US an FBI report that foreign policy reported on said that white supremacist Supremacist sorry were responsible for 49 homicides and 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 and so they were more so than any other domestic extremist movements that can like shows you the prominence the prominence obviously and on variety of the far right in the US And in recent years we see that with the picture we see from Charlottesville We had the rise of right wing alternative media as well as the alt-right and an attempt to unite the right And this is what I'll talk about now for a second where we have this picture from counter protesters from unite the right rally in Charlottesville And this is interesting because it kind of like shows this hybrid environment that Andrew Chadwick talked about We're kind of like want to highlight how the internet and how the offline world can like we're intertwined indeed It was organized by an white nationalist the goal was first and foremost to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville and As well as to unite the right there were some conflicting goals because there were so many groups involved So there's not this one goal Indeed if you look at the poster for the unite the right rally it kind of looks like an all-star lineup from like a concert The participants amongst other were like alt-right personalities were people from the Klan from militias from libertarians The new socialist movements traditionalist workers party, etc. So they were all there and they all Talked about this together on Facebook on reddit on fortune Twitter YouTube Discords to name but a few especially discord wasn't this we got very important Well, they kind of made use of the platform to kind of like plan how they even got to Charlottesville and Did wrote the plan road trips together, etc? In Charlottesville, of course in August it came to a clash of protesters and counter protesters as we are all very much aware of Which resulted in numerous non-lethal injuries the death of two state troopers in a helicopter accident crash And the killing of Heather Hayer by a white nationalist who drove a car into a group of counter protesters Later on this of course was very much discussed in the public mainstream the public spheres However, it was also very much discussed obviously by right-wing activists by far right on reddit on Facebook You name it they made videos on YouTube to kind of like make sense out of what happened to kind of like regain the ground for like how they see what happened and Finally to play the victim card that they were attacked of course In Germany on the other hand We have a slightly different perspective of like the far right and the right wing It's still very much detached from the conservative mainstream. However online. This is very different from the United States The right wing is very much United and usually around like institutions like political parties like the NPD Which is a right wing extremist party that is nowadays luckily almost Without influence and voters this has a different reason though, which I'll come to in a second When we talk about crime in in Germany, it's worse than in the US. We have 84 homicides between 2000 2016 Which is a sharp rise Generally speaking and right wing extremist Violence and we have also right wing related crimes with over 2000 attacks on refugee homes since 2015 and this is actually like a conservative Like number there are numbers that are much higher than that of attacks on refugee homes We have in generally since 2013 three new actors in Germany in the German right We've got Pegida, which is a civil society movement You can see one of them marches here Which is also like not very relevant currently but which used to be very much So a few years back which kind of like United some of the new actors and gave them a platform where they could speak For example the identitarian movement, which you might have heard of Who are like this right wing extremist movement and some of the left in Germany call them neo-nazis with MacBooks? Because they kind of look like hipsters. They kind of like try to appeal to students They try to sanitize indeed right wing extremist thoughts and racism and Kind of like make it more appealing and like back it up more theoretically at least that's their attempt to do so And finally we've got the AFD, which is a right-wing populist party that has ties to right wing extremist movements Although they always kind of like try to distance themselves at least officially, but they factually don't do that Indeed the AFD is now represented in most state parliaments in Germany as well as the national parliament where they are the third strongest party and It doesn't look like they will go anywhere in recent year in the next few years The example I have from Germany is a defend Europe this if you're wondering what that is That is a left-wing like kind of caricature of the defend Europe mission Which was organized by the right-wing extremist identitarian movement? And their goal was let's charter boat Let's go to the Libyan coast and kind of like stop the NGOs who are obviously complicit in Bringing refugees to the Europe to because they kind of like frame it as like they want to stop the deadly illegal immigration into Europe so that was the general idea of the of your Identitarian movement and this was kind of like an interesting story in itself because they kind of looked at different platforms to get money Then like bank accounts to store their money paypalk for example kicked them off their platform But in the end they went to this right-wing extremist we a crowdfunding site called researcher where they managed to Get over two hundred and thirty thousand dollars They asked for eighty thousand Indeed this shows what I talked about earlier that these things are monitored like throughout internationally So this is a German language like project with the identitarian movement that got funded on an US side Far-right people from all over the world To kind of like defend Europe obviously well they planned and funded this all online and in summer last year they kind of like took the sea star that was the boat's name and Wanted to go to the Libyan coast that was kind of like an odyssey in itself because some of the boat crew actually Applied for asylum in the way, which is ironic as I think as well as the boats captain was a think was in jail for one night and Then finally when they reached the Libyan coast they were there for one week and afterwards declared victory they even had a mission accomplished banner in one of their YouTube videos and They received a lot of attention by the mass media as well as on social media for these actions both nationally as well internationally and Obviously Throughout this trip always went back to social media went back to Instagram went back to Twitter to Facebook To YouTube to kind of like show what they were doing So what we can see and if you like Spend a little time looking into the right wing activities online You'll always come back to one platform yearly. This is always YouTube YouTube is being used To kind of like spread the word to kind of make sense of events like charlotte's will To promote their ideas like the defend Europe mission and generally to interact with a bigger mainstream audience Which is always there? Indeed however YouTube is very much under research in a way you can see here the academic publications Generally speaking on social media platforms and YouTube has 1.5 billion users Twitter is 330 however These are Twitter numbers the blue one here and this is YouTube. This is the red one is Facebook Not to talk about the others. So YouTube is under research However, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world with 1.5 billion users in the month 1 billion hours are watched every day on YouTube It's the most you use platform by teenagers in the US with 91 percent Facebook is being used by 53 percent and Twitter by 37 So YouTube is very much used by teenagers and obviously other demographics as well YouTube however is also a new site for people need the Reuters Institute digital news report states that 14 percent in Germany and 20 percent in US use new to use YouTube for news and Of course as I just showed YouTube is all you also used very actively by the right wing to establish their alternative media media That can like counters the mainstream narratives and where they speak truth How can we even get an idea of what is happening on YouTube? This is very much like connected to the to the thing I just talked about that it's hard to do research on YouTube because there's just so much You know like one video often has like a few thousand comments. So where do you start? What do you do and? Generally speaking we can differentiate on YouTube three different aspects the levels the actors and the connections So the levels are generally what do we see on YouTube? We see channels We see videos and we see user comments and like connected to that interactions like dislike With regards to actors we generally have channel owners We have users we have the YouTube staff who create the curate lists and we've got YouTube's algorithms and Finally the connections and with connections I mean connections between videos between channels who is responsible for these connections It's either the channel owners or the YouTube algorithms So what we did is We looked at these channels you can see an example and just to show the difference if you see this featured channels That's something that Fox News did that's why they reference all two Fox News channels However, and that's like what channel owners can do their cell themselves However, the related channel section is something that is not that they can't influence they can either say we want that on our channel page Or we don't however they can't influence what's gonna be related and that's you can see it See an end kind of makes sense right for Fox News to be related I what we see here is the Alex don't channel right next to Fox News as an recommendation by YouTube's algorithm indeed and This is kind of like already perhaps concerning So what we did is we started with the list of channels and this is all with Adrian Ralph flesh together We took we like our own list of channels that we like kind of looked for example We looked through Southern poverty Law Center's list We looked at the literature like Della Porta Kayani and Vigaman for example have a great list of right-wing actors in the yes as well as in Germany and Kind of like went through YouTube and looked for channels that represented these actors that we know from the literature all the Southern poverty Law Center and So we had in the US for example Roughly 320 channels for the right wing Then we had took all channels that we could find that were relevant for political parties and actors in Germany in the US That's were roughly 540 in the US and 193 in Germany and then we took the YouTube mainstream that is like the channels that are the most prominent in the countries That have the most subscribers which you know like are truly mainstream and those were in Germany 100 we took the 100 and in the US we took the top 250 and What we then did is well we followed YouTube's channel recommendation system step by step for all channels that we had and we looked What do these channels or what does YouTube recommend recommend from these channels ongoing? What are the connections between the channels? We this is used a snowball method This is of course used to kind of get rid of the bias that we have because we're not claiming that this is Exhaustive we can't possibly get all these channels for every actor for our YouTube And so we can like use this step and we go one step so related channels two steps and three steps So we have like a big enough variety of channels So we kind of like make sense of what we're seeing on YouTube and to see what communities are created through YouTube's algorithm Here, what's what we see? for Germany We can see here the node size are Is the subscriber count? So we can see the German YouTube mainstream, which is very big we can see the international YouTube This is PewDiePie if you're wondering why what's the big actor here? And in between we can see media we can see like classical media We can see YouTube specific shows that are being created only for YouTube. We can see political parties which are Here and which are not very relevant as you can see kind of like in between the network And then we've got this big community of right wing actors Which are Consist of right wing organizations and alternative media who then have connections through the international right wing So in the next step, we looked at the right wing specifically to kind of like make sense what's happening there and here we can see That we see the identitarian movement, which is very prominent in this YouTube bubble You can see the NPD which I talked about before who has had a very much like without influence currently in Germany Because they don't have any motors anymore Well look no further than the AFD because they probably are responsible for that who are closely connected to them on YouTube And you can like draw people in Algorithmically into this right wing bubble and then we've got like alternative media conspiracy media RT German for example like Russia today is in there as one big source of media of them of their media diet and Indeed we can see that When we think about what we just see that this is called a filter bubble or what Ellie Parisa called a filter bubble That is a community a bubble that is being pushed forward by an algorithm. This is not done by users This is YouTube's algorithm and like its suggestions to like you're like this channels. You might find these related channels interesting as well So we can also see that politicians and political parties are barely relevant in this case Although we had a list of over 200 channels for political parties Most of them were not part of it. They didn't they weren't linked by YouTube algorithm They didn't have a related channels page. They were just like off the grid. You only find them if you're really looking for them However, we can also see that mass media and mainstream channels are far more popular with regards to views and subscribers Then the right wing bubble although we can see that the right wing bubble is extremely densely connected and pushed together by the YouTube YouTube's recommendation algorithm and also push towards the international right this of course backs the question How does it look like in the US? Well, this data is two weeks old. I hope you can roughly make sense of at least these are 1360 642 Channels in the network. This is only like a part of the network there It's in general much bigger because it then also goes quickly into like Russian YouTube Arabian YouTube German YouTube etc This is the core of the US YouTube sphere and here we can obviously like there's This big cluster of like in the middle and there's this one and these will be interesting for us because If we look at what's happening there We can see that we've got music here if you're interested in Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, etc. These are here We've got PewDiePie Logan Paul who you might have heard in recent weeks There we've got Colbert and Seth Meyers and stuff here and then we come into the political bubble We have a small this orange bubble that you can see Here is the liberal progressive Bubble and then we go fall on into conservative media conspiracy theory and the new and old right wing To give a name to some of these channels We see PewDiePie. We see Logan Paul and the most Important channel according to YouTube if you're wondering the note size here's in degree That is how often a channel is being recommended within the network the more often it gets recommended by YouTube and this network the bigger than Node so you can see Alex Jones, although like one point something million Subscribers and PewDiePie who has over 50 million subscribers almost the same in this network Of course, this is kind of like bias because we can't possibly have all of YouTube's channels But this kind of like gives you an idea of how relevant Alex Jones is within this bubble We see the young Turks as most important channel in the liberal bubble more important than CNN for example We can see Fox News as the kind of like this channel for which is in the same bubble and community as Alex Jones we see if you're wondering what this is this is our tea Which also is there and then we go full-on into the conspiracy sector and the right wing sector The one under Alex Jones is local Lionel Nation if you're wondering so Oh sticks and hex and hammer 6 6 6 well you've never heard of him You can try it It's it's a one-man YouTube show who very much pushes right wing narratives So you can see like they have their own alternative media They have their own celebrities these celebrities often like interact with each other criticize each other And we can also see something else because if you look at the network now on the size of the nodes You see that this basically is all just dots very small dots Whereas this is much bigger you can see here this much bigger This is because now the node sizes are according to the subscribers This is like fuck you over 50 million. This is the music network This is like the mainstream network and here we can really see that this is the mainstream for most of the people on YouTube This is what they visit. There's Ted talks and there there's late night and there there's mass media in there But the political sphere is here and mostly irrelevant for subscriber wise Although irrelevant in this way obviously means like that Alex Jones for example is over 1 million views as subscribers. Sorry So we then looked a little bit closer in the right wing bubble to kind of understand what who are those people in this Can we make out different communities and indeed although it's kind of hard to do that here We have the religious right we can see the conspiracy theories, which are still closely connected to the alternative media However, alternative media which is headed by Alex Jones once more This is I think Fox News, which is still in there being dragged in by like YouTube's YouTube's recommendation algorithm. Sorry, and this is also what you always have to keep in mind This is not what like the channels do this is not what users per se do But this is how YouTube thinks the recommendation algorithm should work That these bubbles exist there we have the anti-feminism Part which is very much against political correctness as they call it or SJWs, which is short for social justice warriors We've got the men of fear here or as they call themselves the man going their own way And then we've and then we've got the far right, which is indeed Very interesting because there we can't make out Different communities as for example, we know from the literature You might know from the mass media like the difference between the alt-right and the alt-right and white nationalists and white supremacists Etc like this is all Together clump together basically in this like the more orange sector is more dominated by alt-right figures However, they're like David Duke is for example in there And American Renaissance if you know that outlet is in there and the far right is still like very much like Full-blown far right right wing extremists. However, they're also English-speaking Internationals in there to kind of like promote the same Promote the same messages, but for example European perspective and then we have the international right wing Which is for example the German right wing that we just saw So what when we say about the like to sum these things up for what we just saw well We can say that political parties and politicians are barely relevant in this network indeed I haven't talked about this, but if you're wondering what politicians are here and here There we have over 500 channels for Republicans Democrats from like the GOP account to like very some local accounts. We have politicians accounts We have the Green Party. We have the Libertarian Party and we have the same result as in Germany They are like kind of like in these communities But they have few subscribers and they don't form their own communities in themselves YouTube always pushes you to media outlets or more prominent channels, but that doesn't stay within for example a political party community We in general we see in this big network too closely connected right-wing bubbles Which is prominent like which is dominated by Alex Jones on the one hand We're also Fox News is for example part of and a more like far-right sector However, you can also see from this network that although the right wing is more united Than in other networks that I've seen in the literature. It's still very much fragmented into different groups and what they stand for the one exception is this part here where it's very much Intermingling but from the algorithm But we also have to see or keep in mind that the mainstream is still much much more popular with regards to subscribers And views than the right wing in general So to sum things up We can say that YouTube is highly act like the right wing is highly active and popular on YouTube We can see that the right wing in general and both in Germany as well in the US has close connections To conspiracy theory channels this might not come as a surprise, but you can see this here once more YouTube's recommendation Algorithm does not differentiate between like conservative and far-right for example that you could see for example in this big green bubble Where Fox News was in there and I would say, you know Fox News is definitely not info wars But for YouTube it's kind of like in the same bubble in the same community and YouTube recommends info wars When you're on Fox News channel And they don't differentiate that's a problem as far as we think for the US We can see that although the right wing is closer together than we've seen in other studies It's still very much fragmented into different like groups and it's hard to tell if they'll ever be able to truly unite the right In Germany, however, we see that it's very much clustered around specific actors and one topic, which is currently the refugee crisis and a closely connected Islam Which kind of like keeps them going and if you now say well, you know like this is the algorithm speaking Who says that these groups actually interact with each other like we just saw Maybe YouTube's algorithm just says this is a community, but the users aren't feeling that what Anderson called imagine communities Well, the next study that we did and we're currently on that for the yes Bear with me. This is just for Germany is we downloaded all Comments from videos from these channels in the right wing channels and looked for user overlap and Each connection here between these channels is at least 10% user overlap And so what we see is very much what we saw in the related channels That is this network is closing Is closely connected we can see the key actors that we saw in the related channels very much through the comments as well And we expect or we'll be very much interested to see where that goes where that goes for the US Oh, we can see that this is not just like an algorithmic like result that has no basis in actual user behavior the question of course is Chicken egg like what was first? Does you for example? We don't know how YouTube's recommendation system works Though do they take user overlap for example as an indicator that even would make these networks perhaps more scary But it might be also the other way around which is also not very Pleasant thought However, we can always say and we have to keep that in mind when we think about this and talk about this that the mainstream on YouTube is mostly unpolitical its gaming its YouTube shows and It's much much more popular than the political spheres and especially the right wing spheres and Since I was asked to kind of like make this a little more interactive and bring some like Perhaps like poignant questions with me. I have like for discussion three questions Which I which I think like I have no clear answer with but or for Especially when it comes like coming from counter public perspective That is the first question is should our recommendation algorithms be political and now before you say algorithms are always political I know it's kind of like a pun The question is do we need recommendation algorithms for the political content? Is that something that we want that political content is kind of like put into the same bucket as music for example or entertainment Is it the same do we want that from our companies that they do this that they potentially form these potentially filter bubbles? or enforce these What's up with the left That's something that I asked myself both in Germany as well in the US Now you might of course say well you hadn't in your list far left channels That is true because we want to focus on the far right However, when we look and when you just take the network from our political actors in the US We use 500 something channels that we took and go with these three steps snowball method We have a very similar although a little smaller network, but we can see the same communities on the far right How are we don't see that on the far left? We don't see that we don't see them in the network I have looked for some antifa channels that got Basically, no views and the question is even are they really from the antifa or not We've for example heard if you might have heard about the Antifa Boston Twitter account, which was actually a far right Twitter account So the questions, what's up with them? Where do they where are they do they even need to be there for example? Perhaps they need to be somewhere else and Finally, we do talk a lot about Twitter's assumed influence on the US elections, right? Twitter bots fake news, etc But we're not talking about YouTube's although YouTube as you see is like very much like we have these two bubbles And what we see in these bubbles is pizza gate We see a lot of like Promotion we see like the success of Alex Jones. We see Rt like Russia today in there the question is why don't we talk about this? Is it just like because it's not less influential than potentially Twitter or what's up with that and with that? I thank you for your attention Anybody has any questions happy to take them And Can you speak into the mic because we're recording and it won't hear you if it's not into the mic? That's a good question. I would say less so So I would I would say it might represent like this is obviously a behavior We see however a lot of people as we see with the subscriber count use YouTube in a different way So, of course, this is like not representative of the whole population either of Germany or the United States but if we think of like how much YouTube is used by teenagers how much by like 18 to like 34 year olds and something like these demographics We see that YouTube is by far like the most prominent social network there and also like very much used to news consumption but I agree obviously like people used YouTube differently and There and like some just look at videos and then go back But some use it like and click from video to video to video some go from channel to channel to channel and many people subscribe Thanks so much for your talk I have a Hypothesis question and then a question question as to this question of like why aren't we studying YouTube and why is so much more? Attention proportionally being paid to Twitter. I wonder if this isn't about the sociology of journalism itself And how much of journalists rely on Twitter relative to normal people? So that's like a hypothesis in the form of a question And then I had a kind of epistemological question about classification about how we decide What counts as political content? I sort of think of like the dirtbag left slob of drill for instance There's like a ostensibly a political account But are certain kinds of content about gaming isn't necessarily political so for this kind of network analysis I'm curious how one decides what's the threshold of the political or how you start to tag things that way Thank you so much So with regards to the first one, that's actually like something the graph I had was You see like some of these networks are very big so let's go back to This So this is actually part of something I wrote about with regards to kind of like thinking about like do we overestimate Twitter? Because I think although Twitter is highly Influential and relevant especially from a journalist point of view, especially also like from an academic point of view The question is like how relevant is it and especially in comparison to other parts and I would say All my hypothesis here is that it's down to convenience So like the data is there for researchers and also for journalists like we can easily like research topics on Twitter And we find voices much more voices than we usually get much easier And platform bias so we're on Twitter So we think kind of like Twitter is important and as a lot of research has shown like Twitter has like an elite bias With regards to the second question. Well, the thing is or I totally agree like when we look at Especially the US network. I think it's a little clearer It's a little clearer in the German one, but of course like you can't say Political is either political or apolitical we see for example. We saw with PewDiePie for example who had like discussions about racism That this can very much very quickly be Political we saw with Gamergate that gaming can be highly political And so where we kind of like how we looked at it when we made our list is kind of like go from political actors That are clearly political and say, okay, we want The GOP in there. We want Democratic Party in there. We want the Libertarian party in there and then like there are counts to kind of like where we say, okay This is clear-cut and then we kind of like look more closely and see like okay, obviously for example I would argue that the late night shows like Colbert for example are clearly political and content however like it blurs the line between entertainment and political and political information and so kind of like This is always something that you have to kind of weigh upon that's also why I call this community mainstream and progressive media and Politics because for example a lot of democratic actors or politicians are in there as well. They're just not relevant Thank you, this was really fascinating So again to your last question and this is part hypothesis part question about how much this influences things But it seems like YouTube is Seen as more participatory in some ways than Twitter or Facebook where you can see a headline And you don't necessarily have to click on it to be influenced by it in some way Do you think that the autonomy that goes into choosing to spend a longer amount of time? Goes into how we think about just being influenced by others on a platform rather than choosing to participate in a community Oh tough question So from my communications background, I would say like Influencing per se is really hard like it's hard to kind of like influence people that they should be for example White nationalist this is like almost impossible if you have like if you are of a different opinion How so I would always be like, okay, you have this content and you have a demand for that And I think there is a potential for radicalization Technically there especially like in these environments where it's like these bubbles and kind of like algorithms Might potentially push you in one direction. However, this doesn't mean that you're being radicalized like It depends very much then on the individual how they react on the specific content under what? Circumstances and then kind of like to to become more like prone to this kind of content as well as for example coupling right-wing content with other topics for example against political correctness against Feminism or Gamergate for example were good examples for kind of like how these Discursive opportunity structures were being used to kind of like push all to rights and content Thanks. Well, I'm curious you mentioned with the commenters on on YouTube that there's a significant overlap there I was wondering is there a lot of political bot activity in your view there? Because we've seen like the Oxford Internet Institute is one example of researchers like they've established that on Twitter There's a lot of political about activity, but I'm curious because you know so you know so much about YouTube But that's the also the case there so that's a very good question and YouTube like there was a very good post and I forgot who wrote it because my memory for names is really bad but so there's a lot of automation on YouTube and This leads to like the weirdest videos that you might have ever seen especially in the kids sector where it's like children's entertainment that totally goes crazy and So I would say there's potential for Bots there the question is what exactly and how do you want to do that? Like we we looked at comment overlap because that's I think a straightforward way to kind of like connect Connect YouTube channels with each other or videos with each other the problem Then as you've seen with the OII studies for example on Twitter like how do you identify Twitter bots? Like this is still very hard like the OII has for example also Troubles with actually identifying them a lot of the times they had this threshold of 50 tweets a day Which you know like if you've got time and something to say you might you might actually get So we kind of like don't have no idea really like how to Identify YouTube bots and the questions also is the effort worth it but I would assume they're definitely bots and they're the question is how many and If people even like consider them being worth like the question is how much people trust in YouTube comments I Think so that then because like Twitter seems like a straightforward way read it for example seems like a straightforward way Facebook to YouTube Might be we will have to look into that Thanks for the amazing lecture. I have two questions. The first one is I mean I think that we can add the case of Brazil in the right wing that you Developing a lecture And how can we deal like I mean looking for the case specific for Brazil that the right wing have money and he could put I don't know this money through the social networks so connect with the question that you put in the end what's up the left and Consider the case of another Latin American and countries What could be this international right wing and think consider Another country that you know the expert in the lecture. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your questions Actually, I would say Yasu is here and the room is it's a much better expert on Brazil than I Could ever like dream to be So we're talking about this, but like I'm looking at the US and in Germany kind of like because these are contexts I know about I've read a lot about so and I'm kind of like very like hesitant to go Into countries where I'm not like confident that I'm like able to like Have the full picture and can like get an idea of that The question how to deal with that is in indeed a very like interesting one It's always like the question like how much does like for me the question is how much does social media influence us? And that's like something that we don't have good results on that we can potentially say this is what happens for me Social media generally speaking is something that users seek to find an imagined community And to kind of like find these right wing bubbles to kind of find a shared identity across Something like a topic that might be gaming that might be you know white nationalism Unfortunately, but this is something that I think like you can't necessarily do with money Although obviously money helps you can get the you can get a lot of attention through money And this is something that we've seen for example the identitarian movement We're like very prominent in through this kind of way and also like very we see that in the network Although realistically the identitarian movement is like only a few hundred people but online They seem much much bigger and more influential Jonas, thank you so much for the great talk. This is a really nice contribution going into YouTube and not yet another Twitter study So thank you so much for that. Not that I don't like Twitter studies My question is how to interpret the communities that form on on YouTube So we have a general sense of Twitter and that they're typically a more It's a more elite platform and more politically engaged people are there If we think about Facebook, it's kind of a broader concentric circle outward with more people participating Where does YouTube fit into that and how do we conceptualize who's there and who's not I think? Very good question, and I don't think I'll be able to fully answer that I think YouTube is in this way a very like interesting platform that is very different to Facebook as well as Twitter Because it can be used in many different ways So it's for example people who can use it for news and can just watch movies It's like a very passive usage like also what you said earlier like you don't have to interact with YouTube Like YouTube doesn't force you to make an account to use it YouTube doesn't force you to likes and to comment So this is something that we don't necessarily see with other platforms so much We're like your activity is so much like part of the whole thing I think YouTube is kind of like a mix though because it very much Allows you to interact with people to kind of like have discussions To kind of like interact both on a comment level as well as on videos like we've seen a lot of videos in the right wing for example that answer to each other and that's kind of like This each other basically because they disagree with each other And so this is like it always comes back to kind of like the different levels that we're seeing on YouTube And where we can like want to look at and I think Twitter We've much more figured out what Twitter can be used for and what we can look for And how this makes sense in a broader network public sphere Whereas YouTube is like this because there's some little research on it It's like this kind of like unknown where we'll have to figure out what its role in society truly is My hunch would be that YouTube is for entertainment and basically feeling Like and for confirmation So we kind of like go to YouTube because we want to laugh when I look at cat videos or Gaming or music But or we want kind of like want to see what we think and we want to see people on this Vid on the screen tell us that they just agree basically with us And I think we have to kind of like make sense of what we're seeing So I know this is like a bad answer to like your question But it's it's something like we were thinking about hard And I think we need to figure out what what it can be done what and what YouTube's role in society truly is Jonas I came because I was Attracted to your doctor of thesis at Zebulin on the sociology networking of climate denial in Europe I wonder what your extended Networking studies have Turned up since then about the degree to which the quantitative disparities In in audience and commenters In the the denial of fear if you will Relative to the extremely small number of actual climate scientists in the real world Tells us about the rise of the bottom fires in in climate polemics Oh boy. Thank you. Thank you for reading my thesis The the the money stats being that The leading climate denial blog claims 300 million hits 47,000 followers Whereas my colleagues who write for journals like climatic change Number in the low hundreds. Yeah, it's a small field. Yes. That's that's like the field of science communication especially this goes for climate science as well as like for example Anti-vexing movements where it's like very much. We've got this disparity between like academic Knowledge being having like little readership. However, we always can like think that through public engagement That is blogs, but also through media coverage. There's like this this wider audience and The thing with climate change skepticism or denial I feel is like if that is also like for example in Germany connected to the right wing That's what that's why I'm here actually Because a colleague and I couldn't just push one wrote a paper on basically the climate change skeptics in Germany Where it was also like some of the far right were involved there because they kind of like Have a lot of like topics to talk about and climate change being one of them and so I feel that climate change skepticism especially in the S is much bigger than the far right because like it's more it's more popular although like that's more like okay to have this opinion in the US then for example to be like Truly white nationalist or think of white supremacy So I would say like interestingly enough that In this regard like especially in the US like in Germany, it's a little bit different that Climate change skepticism in this way, although very much connected for example to channels like Alex Jones Might be a topic we get into like right wing although this is more I feel in Germany than in the US the case Hi, thank you for this great talk and there's so much to engage with that. It's hard to know where to begin But let me ask you this one sort of question you you talk about YouTube almost as if it's an autonomous system But it's really a corporation making choices and it's somehow been immune from a lot of the scrutiny and criticism that Facebook and Twitter have had that's changed with those bizarre Child videos that I still can't wrap my mind around But what what do you think? Google should be doing to make this all a little more Transparent and obvious what's happening and what should we be doing if we're so inclined to put pressure on Google so that we can understand What their algorithms are doing to society? That's a good question And I think the first the first thing that we should be doing and what we're Adrian and I are trying to contribute It's kind of like actually make people aware that this is happening like with YouTube We don't have the same kind of research. We don't have this knowledge of what is happening there Indeed for example these networks that I've just shown you are like I think like I haven't seen them somewhere else So kind of like it's important to kind of like highlight what is happening and then basically to understand what content is actually being watched they wanted content is being produced there and Then to put pressure on Google so as a German obviously I would say like you know governments can regulate in the US That's a little less popular. I know So the really question is and I think Google Some in some way already like sees this as a problem and kind of like tries to deal with this The problem is like on YouTube. There's so many channels though And like it's very hard to kind of like get them and since the videos are videos and not text per se It's really hard to like know when a video for example is right wing extremist when it's for example Sorry in the German case when it actually like violates law Because we can't tell by the text in itself So Google just should like be made aware of this issue They should be like hold to scrutiny as we do with Twitter and Facebook rightfully so And they should really like work on this and see this as a problem where they see okay We have this giant user base on our platform I don't think that throwing them off the platform necessarily is the best solution But they should kind of like see what's happening and Requestion like their algorithms. That's at least what they can do like we should hold them accountable for what they kind of like help produce And I think we have time for one more question Thank you. Thanks very much for it. That was super interesting. You're not Adding to the hypothetical question of how YouTube and Twitter can relate to each other So I have I had like two thoughts and I would really love to hear your feedback So I was thinking that first for me YouTube It's more like in a temporal Place that you put things and it's not like so update like Twitter that you are like receiving all the time like super like the like the hottest news right that's one thing and So that would make for me like go to Twitter or to the newspaper instead of going to YouTube to watch political stuff and the other thought was like YouTube all the videos are like heavy data So if you are walking with your phone Do you prefer to see Twitter which is like less costly for you than try to download a video? So that make me think about what about the implications with net neutrality with these Things and YouTube implication and I would love to hear your comments. Oh boy I think definitely like net neutrality is a big big issue for all kinds of like Politics or like all kinds of content obviously online, especially video content that is much more like data intensive and in this way It's obviously harms this but it doesn't know only like obviously doesn't limit to far right It's just like it's harmful to like general online content So I think that that is straightforward And I think you're very much right in your assessment that Twitter has a different role in people's like media diets than YouTube however we have to keep in mind that YouTube is often used kind of like as a Replacement or not by some people at least as a replacement to for example the news like CNN or Fox News Because they kind of like don't see their opinions represented there And so they kind of like turn to alternative media for example like Russia today Or other right-wing news sites that are very at times very professionally done and that can like tell them What they want to hear and promote the issues that they think are important in this way kind of like we might think Or this is like a working hypothesis, but this has been said before that YouTube is kind of like the Radio talk shows that we've seen since the 80s or like people like kind of like talk about like though in the stream of consciousness about topics and Kind of like promote their opinions and are being very much reviewed by a younger Audience then for example the radio shows but which are I think still very much in line from what we've seen in the 80s and 90s And what we see on YouTube now So thanks for coming out Jonas will stay at the front for a little bit if anybody wants to ask him a question or just chat about his research Again Becca is over here in the red if you're interested in learning more about our fellowship and Insubmitting an application Otherwise net neutrality more net neutrality on Thursday and monkey selfies next week. Thanks