Exploring how a YouTube channel’s political stance is associated with early Covid-19 communication on YouTube
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20508366 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Seung Woo Chae (0000-0003-3660-8272, Indiana University, corresponding author), Noriko Hara (0000-0003-1915-1434, Indiana University) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 618-644 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Information Communication & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-118X • E-ISSN: 1468-4462 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369118x.2023.2227674 |
| OpenAlex | W4382281593 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 34 |
The unexpected chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a host of political discussions in the US, including conversations about the Trump administration’s COVID-related policies. During these conversations, major news outlets represented each political group’s stance using social media in addition to their traditional channels. This study explores how those news outlets’ political stances relate to early COVID-19 social media discourse with three distinct methods. We selected two YouTube videos about the World Health Organization (WHO)’s declaration of a pandemic from two news outlets with contrasting political stances, Fox News and MSNBC. Three types of analyses were conducted to compare those videos on different observation levels: (1) a video network analysis based on the YouTube recommendation algorithm, (2) a framing analysis exploring how differently the two news outlets delivered the news, and (3) a content analysis of viewer comments. Our results demonstrate that the videos were not directly connected to each other in the YouTube recommendation network, that they delivered the same news with contrasting frames, and that characteristics of the viewers’ comments – commenters’ political positions, roles in knowledge sharing, and social cues – significantly or partially significantly related to the YouTube channel’s political position. Based on these findings, we argue that while news outlets’ political stances were associated with the behaviors of all three types of agents on YouTube – news outlets, their viewers, and the platform – to some extent, the viewer groups’ knowledge-sharing behaviors did not significantly differ as the news outlets’ contrasting frames did
Advertising · Business · Internet privacy · Media studies · News media · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social media · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Medicine · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Social Media and Politics
Content analysis
The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Content Analysis
ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software
Issues and Best Practices in Content Analysis
Gephi
Fast unfolding of communities in large networks
Negotiating the Data Deluge on YouTube
YouTube as a source of misinformation on Covid-19 vaccination
Poverty in the News
The echo chamber is overstated
Co-constructing controversy
Post-Truth
Social media and the future of open debate
Conceptualizing communities of truth on YouTube
Echo chambers online
Who is responsible for Twitter’s echo chamber problem? Evidence from 2016 U.S. election networks
Disinformation by Design
Filter bubble
Humor as a Double-Edged Sword
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |