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- Processing more than 79M comments, we show that the three communities increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. content in the past. We also probe YouTube's recommendation algorithm, looking at more than 2M million recommendations for videos and channels between May and July 2019. We find that Alt-lite content is easily reachable from I.D.W. channels via recommendations and that Alt-right channels may be reached from both I.D.W. and Alt-lite channels. Overall, we paint a comprehensive picture of user radicalization on YouTube and provide methods to transparently audit the platform and its recommender system.
See also this earlier report for more research.