Rhetorical Strategy and Moral Signaling in Politically Charged Content for YouTube
There is a literature highlighting the path to right wing radicalization on YouTube, from Cornell, The New York Times, and The Daily Beast.
I recently had discovered and become a fan of Contrapoints, a YouTube channel designed to address the arguments and framework that the right had been using to success, from a leftist perspective. She found that the left had too little engaging video content online to oppose the cascade of right wing youtube video content, especially in a format which engaged disaffected young men.
With this observation I wanted to see how Contrapoints and leftist YouTubers like her are similar to their right wing counterparts, especially in the rhetorical composition of their videos. Fortunately, I was taking a class on statistical text analysis at Carnegie Mellon, where a text tagging software was developed for precisely this purpose: DocuScope.
Take a look at the report, or the repositories for analysis or for scraping youtube transcripts
andrew Follmann
thanks for reading!