Broadcasting the Culture War - Audience Engagement in YouTube’s Alternative Community

Since 2018, YouTube has become known as a powerful radicalizer.
Scholars alerted that algorithmic recommendations amplify extreme
political content disseminated within a network of alternative
influencers. Recently, this radicalization framework was critiqued for
being too technology-centric, and a more thorough empirical account
of audience engagement was called for. The proposed PhD-project
intends to present such an account, covering audience engagement
with six popular alternative influencers in three crucial historical
periods on YouTube: Alex Jones and The Young Turks (2008-2014),
Steven Crowder and Tim Pool (2014-2017), ContraPoints and
PhilosophyTube (2017-2020). Their audiences left a vast sum of
digital traces via small acts of engagement, e.g., (dis)likes and
comments. These traces are planned to be studied employing a
netnographic approach, integrating quantitative large-scale
computational linguistics and qualitative thick descriptions. The
expected result is a theorization on how radical political narratives tie
into the everyday practices of YouTube audiences that can serve
societal stakeholders in the field of media literacy to build on civic
values and radicalization prevention. Moreover, the project
methodologically contributes a new YouTube analytic module within
the 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit to help future researchers
study YouTube empirically in a novel way.