Right-Wing YouTube: A Supply and Demand Perspective Kevin Munger Joseph Phillips September 21, 2020 Abstract 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 towards 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. Kevin Munger is assistant professor of Political Science and Social Data Analyt- ics at the Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the impact of emerging communication technologies on political communi- cation and social science methodology. Contact: Pond Laboratory, State College, PA, 16801, USA.
[email protected]. (814-863-8346). Joseph Phillips is a PhD student in Political Science at Pennsylvania State Uni- versity. His research focuses on the development of partisan animosity and its impacts on trust in institutions. Keywords: YouTube, Radicalization, Conservatism, Political Extremism 1 1 Introduction to YouTube Politics YouTube represents a major democratization of political media in the medium that has consistently proven the most popular and most powerful: video. Human beings are designed to communicate audiovisually, and YouTube, more than virtually any major social networking site, uses audiovisual communication.