A visualization showing the relations and recommendation flows between political & cultural commentary on YouTube

Channels were included if the met the following criteria

• 10k+ subscribers. If subscriber data is missing/lower, still include if video's average above 10k views
• Significant focus (more than 30% of content) on US political or cultural news/commentary. I considered cultural commentary was anything from the ISideWith social issues list

There is no definitive list of YouTube channels, so a variety of techniques were used.

• Reviewed the following lists:
  • https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
  • https://blog.feedspot.com/political_youtube_channels/
  • https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/tag/politics/videoviews
  • https://channelcrawler.com/
  • custom algorithm prioritizing most recommended channels from existing seed channels. ChannelExclude.csv is was used to remove recommendations once reviewed.
  • Data & Society Alternative Influence Report
• Related videos/channels from existing channels
• Searches for keywords from ISideWith social issues list
• Suggestions from reviewers and my own knowledge

Over time, the ease of finding channels has diminished. I estimate the list as of 2008-12-13 is at least 2/3 of all channels that meet this criteria (in terms of views). Please email me if you have additional channel suggestions.

For news:

• Compare https://www.adfontesmedia.com and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. If they exist in those lists and were in agreement then I accepted that category. Otherwise I used the same process as with the commentary channels.

For political/cultural commentary I considered all of the following:

• Self identified political label, or support for a party
• One sided content on divided political topics of the day (e.g. Kavanaugh, Migrant Caravan)
• One sided content reacting to cultural events topics of the day (e.g. campus protests, trans activism )
• Clearly matches Democrat (left) or Republican (right) views on issues in the ISideWith poll

If these considerations align in the same direction then the channel is left or right. If there was a mix then they are assigned the center/heterodox category.

Notes/Caveats:

• There is some criticism for not using a more procedural/quantifiable method for determining political category (e.g. like the process used for https://www.adfontesmedia.com). I don't believe making this process more detailed and quantitative would give you a significantly more accurate/objective answer. Also, US politics is so polarized that there aren't enough in question to make a difference when comparing aggregate views/recommendations.
• Some commentators had content exclusively critical of social justice issues despite identifying as left, centrist or liberal. I added an extra category for this as neither them nor their detractors would be content with either of standard categorizations.
• When it wasn't clear which side they fell on, then I categorized the channel as Centrist/Heterodox

The YouTube API is used to get all channel, video, recommendation data. For all seed channels, get a list of videos within the configured time range (Jan 1 2018 or later) For all videos, retrieve the top 10 recommended videos

See the list of channels and their political categories in SeedChannels.csv. The latest data and statistics retrieved form YouTube is link at the bottom of the visualization.

Channel Relation Graph The "bubble" chart is a force directed graph. The area (not the radius) of each bubble corresponds to the number of views of a channels video's. The force/size of link line corresponds to the portion of recommendations between those channels.

NOTE:

• When new data is added, the orientation and the final clustering of channels changes significantly. Unlike a principal component analysis (or similar) it does not display a quantifiable statistic by the location. The chart animates the simulated forces when opening to show this process.

Recommendation Flow Diagram The left boxes in the flow diagram show the number of views. it is broken down by split by channel (when one is selected) or political category otherwise. The right side shows the portion of those views (according to the number of times the other channels video's were in the recommended list) given to the category/channel.

A function runs each day and updates data from the YouTube API about the seed channels, their videos and recommendations.

• Cached in cloud storage with history
• Collected into a snapshot data as of each day into Channels.parquet , Videos.parquet , Recommends.parquet files publicly accessible (replace date and file as required): https://ytnetworks.blob.core.windows.net/data/analysis/2018-11-28/Channels.parquet
• Data from 2018 Jan 1st - Now
• Analysed using this DataBricks notebook