The MeLa BitChute Dataset

Trujillo, Milo Z.; Gruppi, Maurício; Buntain, Cody; Horne, Benjamin D.

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2202.05364

Cited by 2 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Although content creators can earn revenue through many avenues including direct subscriptions, sponsorships, and merchandise sales (Hua et al 2022), cryptocurrencies became a popular form of payment among far-right content creators after financial companies like Paypal and Patreon began deplatforming them (Keatinge, Keen, and Izenman 2019; ISD 2020; Bogle 2021) 2. Trujillo et al (2022) find there were only 61,000 accounts on Bitchute between June 2019 to December 2021, well below the cutoff necessary for regulation. 3.…”

Section: Author Notesmentioning

confidence: 79%

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Does Deplatforming Work?

Klinenberg

2023

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Social media has become an outlet for extremists to fundraise and organize. While governments deliberate on how to regulate, some social media companies have removed creators of offensive content —deplatforming. I estimate the effects of deplatforming on revenue and viewership, using variation in the timing of removals across two video-streaming companies — YouTube, and its far-right competitor, Bitchute. Being deplatformed on Youtube results in a 30% increase in weekly Bitcoin revenue and a 50% increase in viewership on Bitchute. This increase in Bitchute activity is less than that on YouTube, meaning that deplatforming works in decreasing a content creator’s overall views and revenue.

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Section: Author Notesmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…2.Trujillo et al (2022) find there were only 61,000 accounts on Bitchute between June 2019 to December 2021, well below the cutoff necessary for regulation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Deplatforming Work?

Klinenberg

2023

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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“…To answer our research questions, we combine two publicly-available datasets: the VoterFraud2020 dataset [1] and the MeLa-BitChute dataset [30].…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To enhance our extracted data from the VoterFraud2020 dataset, we extract metadata for all linked to BitChute videos using the MeLa-BitChute dataset. The MeLa-BitChute dataset contains data from 3M videos published by 61K channels between June 2019 and December 2021 on BitChute [30]. Since BitChute does not have a public API for data collection, this data was collected using a custom built scraper and contains metadata on nearly every video published on the platform during that time.…”

Section: The Mela-bitchute Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even though there are growing concerns about YouTube and BitChute's roles online, relatively few studies have compared the cross-platform spread of their content. This lack of study is partially due to the difficulty of getting BitChute data, as it has no public API [30], and partially due to the need to examine the platforms within a single, comparable context. This paper begins to fill this gap through a descriptive analysis of YouTube and BitChute content shared on Twitter during the discussions of election fraud in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Characterizing YouTube and BitChute Content and Mobilizers During U.S. Election Fraud Discussions on Twitter

Childs¹,

Buntain²,

Trujillo³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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In this study, we characterize the cross-platform mobilization of YouTube and BitChute videos on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Election fraud discussions. Specifically, we extend the VoterFraud2020 dataset [1] to describe the prevalence of content supplied by both platforms, the mobilizers of that content, the suppliers of that content, and the content itself. We find that while BitChute videos promoting election fraud claims were linked to and engaged with in the Twitter discussion, they played a relatively small role compared to YouTube videos promoting fraud claims. This core finding points to the continued need for proactive, consistent, and collaborative content moderation solutions rather than the reactive and inconsistent solutions currently being used. Additionally, we find that cross-platform disinformation spread from video platforms was not prominently from bot accounts or political elites, but rather average Twitter users. This finding supports past work arguing that research on disinformation should move beyond a focus on bots and trolls to a focus on participatory disinformation spread.

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The MeLa BitChute Dataset

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Does Deplatforming Work?

Does Deplatforming Work?

Characterizing YouTube and BitChute Content and Mobilizers During U.S. Election Fraud Discussions on Twitter

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