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ABSTRACT
YouTube videos are a ubiquitous source of information but also a venue for users to comment on discussion boards that addend videos. There are no moderators of these discussions, and thus there is a possibility for self-appointed leaders to emerge, responding incessantly and across a genre of videos. These “elites,” as they are labelled here, use the discussion as a personal campaign tool, diminishing the deliberative potential of provocative topics. To determine whether this is happening and to complement existing research analyzing the content of comments, this paper focuses on the structure of the discussions that follow the most popular climate change-related videos. Network analysis confirms that discussions can be elite-driven, appearing in two different network structure types. Among the core group of elite commenters, most are either climate change activists or sceptics, and the most prolific commenters among this core group are activists.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Gi-Tae Nam, Xanat Meza, and Ji-Young Park for their data processing efforts and to Loet Leydesdorff and Muhammad Omar for their comments and suggestions regarding data analysis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We acknowledge that the user base/audience for YouTube is younger than the general public (Burgess & Green, Citation2009): “82% of 18- to 29-year olds used YouTube in 2014, compared with 34% of those 65 and older” (Pew Research Center, Citation2015). It is, however, increasingly used by larger swaths of the public (Pew Research Center, Citation2012).
2. We do not consider comments that fail to generate a response.
3. These signals are, of course, not representative of the general public given differences between the Internet-connected and the non-connected public (Perrin & Duggan, Citation2015), but there has been a groundswell in viewership and commenting, particularly for YouTube-based political discussions among the youth (Brubaker et al., Citation2015).
4. Consumption of “civic information” online, however, does lead to more voting (Feezell et al., Citation2016).
5. Web addresses for each of these 10 videos can be found in the Appendix. It should be noted that YouTube-based information is public for public accounts and thus no formal approval is required from YouTube users (Thelwall, Citation2009).
6. See Sams, Lim, and Park (Citation2011) and Thelwall (Citation2012), respectively, for further insight into API-based social science e-research and YouTube techniques.
7. It should be noted that the convention for listing post-video comments in reverse chronological order ended in 2013, after the collection of our data.
8. Details about the coding process, as stated in Shapiro and Park (Citation2015) are as follows:
A total of 10 relevant narratives were identified [from Nisbet (Citation2009)]: climate change/global warming … is economically costly, is a shared moral challenge for everyone, is a solvable challenge, has unavoidable consequences (i.e. fatalism), is a matter for scientists and experts, is still debated by scientists, has been blown out of proportion by scientists, has been blown out of proportion by politicians, reveals problems with science and expertise in policymaking, and is a game among elite. To limit bias and establish a reliable assessment of each video's narrative(s), we employed 17 undergraduate students at a university in Chicago to assign narratives to each of these videos. [W]e assigned an affirmative code if at least 70 percent or more respondents selected the respective narrative category.
9. Network figures for the remaining eight videos are available upon request to the corresponding author.
10. “Skepticism” and “activism” codes were confirmed through intercoder reliability checks of random samples of comments (n = 50) by each of the 46 highlighted commenters. This coding exercise involved both authors being simultaneously present. No intercoder reliability statistics are provided because there was complete agreement.