@article {107,
	title = {Examining the Consumption of Radical Content on YouTube},
	journal = {PNAS},
	volume = {118},
	number = {32},
	year = {2021},
	abstract = {Although it is under-studied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube{\textquoteright}s scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical {\textquotedblleft}anti-woke{\textquotedblright} channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of {\textquotedblleft}anti-woke{\textquotedblright} content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101967118},
	author = {Homa Hosseinmardi and Amir Ghasemian and Aaron Clauset and Markus Mobius and David M. Rothschild and Duncan Watts}
}
