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YouTube is the most used social network in the United States and the only major platform that is more popular among right-leaning users. We propose the “Supply and Demand” framework for analyzing politics on YouTube, with an eye toward understanding dynamics among right-wing video producers and consumers. We discuss a number of novel technological affordances of YouTube as a platform and as a collection of videos, and how each might drive supply of or demand for extreme content. We then provide large-scale longitudinal descriptive information about the supply of and demand for conservative political content on YouTube. We demonstrate that viewership of far-right videos peaked in 2017.

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A s non-democratic regimes have adapted to the proliferation of social media, they have began actively engaging with Twitter to enhance regime resilience. Using data taken from the Twitter accounts of Venezuelan legislators during the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, we fit a topic model on the text of the tweets and analyze patterns in hashtag use by the two coalitions. We argue that the regime's best strategy in the face of an existential threat like the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter was to advance many competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition's criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursued different rhetorical strategies in keeping with our predictions about managing the conflict advanced by the protesters. This article extends the literature on social media use during protests by focusing on active engagement with social media on the part of the regime. This approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.

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Abstract “Clickbait” headlines designed to entice people to click are frequently used by both legitimate and less-than-legitimate news sources. Contemporary clickbait headlines tend to use emotional partisan appeals, raising concerns about their impact on consumers of online news. This article reports the results of a pair of experiments with different sets of subject pools: one conducted using Facebook ads that explicitly target people with a high preference for clickbait, the other using a sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We estimate subjects’ individual-level preference for clickbait, and randomly assign sets of subjects to read either clickbait or traditional headlines. Findings show that older people and non-Democrats have a higher “preference for clickbait,” but reading clickbait headlines does not drive affective polarization, information retention, or trust in media.

My first publication as a grad student was a field experiment using Twitter “bots” to socially sanction users engaged in racist harassment. The ascendant paradigm in quantitative social science emphasizes the need for research to be “internally valid,” with a preference for randomized control trials like the one I conducted. That research project was well received, both by the political science discipline and the public, but I no longer believe that one-off field experiments are as valuable a tool for studying online behavior as I once did. The problem is that the knowledge they generate decays too rapidly (alternatively, that the realms in which it can be applied are too few) because the object of study changes too rapidly. I have been developing the concept of “temporal validity” as form of “external validity” that is particularly relevant to the study of social media. I suggest two avenues for producing more temporally valid research: (1) faster, more transparent publication (adapting the CS model of conference proceedings); (2) a “hollowing out” of empirical research, replacing medium-scale experimentation like my own work with either purely descriptive work (ethnographic or large-scale) or with massive, collaborative, replicable experimentation.