Holding the greatest area of rainforest in the world, Brazil has seen the adoption of a far-right anti-environmental agenda under the administration of Jair Bolsonaro. This agenda was backed by a transnational infrast...
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Holding the greatest area of rainforest in the world, Brazil has seen the adoption of a far-right anti-environmental agenda under the administration of Jair Bolsonaro. This agenda was backed by a transnational infrastructure of right-wing media outlets on online platforms, including the conservative YouTube channel Brasil Paralelo. Our research attempted to understand how environmental conspiracies in Brasil Paralelo's documentary Cortina de Fumaca (in English, smokescreen) took advantage of both digital platform affordances and political alignment with the far-right government to gain social adherence and relevance. By carrying out topic modeling on more than 13,000 comments and network analysis of 982 recommended videos on YouTube, we aimed to analyze the following: (1) which narratives fostered in the documentary have reverberated among the audience that published comments on its YouTube page and (2) what type of video does YouTube recommend for users who watched Cortina de Fumaca. Our results show that far-right anti-environmental discourse is instrumentalized as yet another component of modern culture wars, where environmental conspiracies are placed side by side with other conspiratorial claims regarding politics, gender, religion, and other ideological subjects.
algorithms and especially recommendation algorithms play an important role online, most notably on YouTube. Yet, little is known about the network communities that these algorithms form. We analyzed the channel recomm...
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algorithms and especially recommendation algorithms play an important role online, most notably on YouTube. Yet, little is known about the network communities that these algorithms form. We analyzed the channel recommendations on YouTube to map the communities that the social network is creating through its algorithms and to test the network for homophily, that is, the connectedness between communities. We find that YouTube's channel recommendation algorithm fosters the creation of highly homophilous communities in the United States (n = 13,529 channels) and in Germany (n = 8,000 channels). Factors that seem to drive YouTube's recommendations are topics, language, and location. We highlight the issue of homophilous communities in the context of politics where YouTube's algorithms create far-right communities in both countries.
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