YouTube

Social media is used by millions of Americans to access news and politics. Yet there are no studies, to date, examining whether these behaviors systematically vary for those whose political incorporation process is distinct from those in the majority. We fill this void by examining how Latino online political activity compares to that of white Americans and the role of language in Latinos’ online political engagement. We hypothesize that Latino online political activity is comparable to whites. Moreover, given media reports suggesting that greater quantities of political misinformation are circulating on Spanish versus English-language social media, we expect reliance on Spanish-language social media for news predicts beliefs in inaccurate political narratives. Our survey findings, which we believe to be the largest original survey of the online political activity of Latinos and whites, reveal support for these expectations. Latino social media political activity, as measured by sharing/viewing news, talking about politics, and following politicians, is comparable to whites, both in self-reported and digital trace data. Latinos also turned to social media for news about COVID-19 more often than did whites. Finally, Latinos relying on Spanish-language social media usage for news predicts beliefs in election fraud in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.

We present a method for estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos. As online media increasingly influences how people engage with politics, so does the importance of quantifying the ideology of such media for research. The subfield of estimating ideology as a latent variable has often focused on traditional actors such as legislators, while more recent work has used social media data to estimate the ideology of ordinary users, political elites, and media sources. We build on this work by developing a method to estimate the ideologies of YouTube videos, an important subset of media, based on their accompanying text metadata. First, we take Reddit posts linking to YouTube videos and use correspondence analysis to place those videos in an ideological space. We then train a text-based model with those estimated ideologies as training labels, enabling us to estimate the ideologies of videos not posted on Reddit. These predicted ideologies are then validated against human labels. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this method by applying it to the watch histories of survey respondents with self-identified ideologies to evaluate the prevalence of echo chambers on YouTube. Our approach gives video-level scores based only on supplied text metadata, is scalable, and can be easily adjusted to account for changes in the ideological climate. This method could also be generalized to estimate the ideology of other items referenced or posted on Reddit.