Exploring how a YouTube channel’s political stance is associated with early COVID-19 communication on YouTube

ABSTRACT

The unexpected chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a host of political discussions in the US, including conversations about the Trump administration’s COVID-related policies. During these conversations, major news outlets represented each political group’s stance using social media in addition to their traditional channels. This study explores how those news outlets’ political stances relate to early COVID-19 social media discourse with three distinct methods. We selected two YouTube videos about the World Health Organization (WHO)’s declaration of a pandemic from two news outlets with contrasting political stances, Fox News and MSNBC. Three types of analyses were conducted to compare those videos on different observation levels: (1) a video network analysis based on the YouTube recommendation algorithm, (2) a framing analysis exploring how differently the two news outlets delivered the news, and (3) a content analysis of viewer comments. Our results demonstrate that the videos were not directly connected to each other in the YouTube recommendation network, that they delivered the same news with contrasting frames, and that characteristics of the viewers’ comments – commenters’ political positions, roles in knowledge sharing, and social cues – significantly or partially significantly related to the YouTube channel’s political position. Based on these findings, we argue that while news outlets’ political stances were associated with the behaviors of all three types of agents on YouTube – news outlets, their viewers, and the platform – to some extent, the viewer groups’ knowledge-sharing behaviors did not significantly differ as the news outlets’ contrasting frames did.

KEYWORDS:

• YouTube
• COVID-19
• knowledge sharing
• political communication
• network analysis
• framing analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ellen Ogihara for editing help on this paper. We also appreciate the two anonymous reviewers’ essential comments and helpful suggestions that have much improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The related videos list can vary by user history when logged in.

2 As Fox did not provide a video transcript, the only provided transcript was from MSNBC.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seung Woo Chae

Seung Woo Chae is a Ph.D. candidate in The Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a full-time research associate in the Information & Library Science Department in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Noriko Hara

Noriko Hara is a professor of information science and the department chair of the Information & Library Science Department in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington.