Making sense of ambivalence: audience perceptions and uses of Ben Shapiro as an alternative political commentator

ABSTRACT

Alternative Political Commentators (APCs) have gained prominence on digital platforms as new opinion leaders to politically engaged young adults. This study responds to a growing demand for an audience-focused exploration of perceptions and use practices of what has been described as reactionary digital media. We specifically examine the case of Ben Shapiro, a leading conservative voice on YouTube, employing a mixed-methods approach, triangulating computational analyses of YouTube comments (n = 711,909) with in-depth interviews with young (18–33) daily Shapiro viewers based in Belgium (n = 15). Positioning Shapiro as an ambivalent online political figure, our study conceptualizes the two primary roles he fulfills for his audiences: (1) the rational articulate and non-emotional news provider, and (2) the affective witty and sometimes rude entertainer who skillfully ‘destroys’ opponents in so-called YouTube drama. Within their everyday life context, we reveal how audiences, in a likewise ambivalent manner, oscillate between casual use of Shapiro the entertainer and structured use of Shapiro the news provider. Through a reconstruction of Shapiro's dual role, our contribution suggests his style, particularly his voice, as a central quality through which audiences navigate Shapiro's ambivalence in their sense-making practices of him as an Alternative Political Commentator.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative Political Commentators
• audiences
• ambivalent Internet
• Ben Shapiro
• YouTube
• media use

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the students Nick Goovaerts and Adrien Rami for their help with recruiting part of the participants, conducting part of the interviews, and transcribing part of the recordings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The settings for the analyses were as followed: model-type=Word2Vec, algorithm=skipgram, window=7, and the dimensionality of the vectors were 100, 200, and 300 (standard settings in 4CAT). Finally, we also used negative sampling and detecting bigrams. 4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit allows for highly transparent computational analyses tracking every step in the analytical process. All information about the YouTube comments dataset and raw results from the similar word analyses are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10640908) (Jurg, 2024).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (grant number FWOTM1133).

Notes on contributors

Daniël Jurg

Daniel Jurg is a PhD researcher connected to the Department of Communication Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He is a member of the research unit News: Uses, Strategies & Engagements (NUSE) within the research group imec-SMIT (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technology). In addition, he is a member of the Open Intelligence Lab at the University of Amsterdam. Working on a scholarship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Daniel studies the history of so-called alternative influences on YouTube. His work specifically aims to develop theories regarding the role of participatory YouTube audiences in the emergence of reactionary digital politics, employing a digital methods approach to analyze engagement via YouTube comment sections. Email: [email protected]

Sarah Vis

Sarah Vis is a PhD researcher and teaching assistant connected to the Department of Communication Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is a member of the research unit News: Uses, Strategies & Engagements (NUSE) within the research group imec-SMIT (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technology). Through the lens of personal news curation practices, her 6-year PhD project examines how young adults engage with the intertwinement of journalistic and non-journalistic voices when encountering news on social media. From an audience perspective, the study relies on in-depth interviews combined with digital method tools. The PhD research lies at the intersection of audience, journalism, and cultural studies. Email: [email protected]

Ike Picone

Dr. Ike Picone is an Associate Professor and head of the program council committee of the Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He heads the research unit on News: Uses, Strategies & Engagements at research group imec-SMIT (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technology). He teaches on the subjects of journalism and democracy, journalism practice, and journalism trends and technologies. The thread within his research is the study of news use practices within the broad field of journalism studies. He is particularly interested in disruptions at the crossroads of journalism, technological innovations, and democracy. He heads the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Media Research. He is part of the international team working on the yearly Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. His expertise has been acknowledged amongst others through his membership of the Flemish Council for Journalism, the temporary expert group on Fake News of former Belgian Minister of Digital Agenda Alexander De Croo (2019), and his work on online disinformation for the Hannah Arendt Institute. He is a coordinating member of the EDMO BeLux hub that will help fight disinformation in Belgium and Luxembourg as part of the European Digital Media Observatory local hubs network. Email: [email protected]