Visualizing YouTube’s comment space: online hostility as a network phenomena

Abstract

This study examines YouTube’s comment space. By focusing on responses to the provocative musical group, Das Racist, we offer an innovative analysis of online racialized expression as a networked phenomenon. A blend of social network analysis, qualitative coding, and thick data descriptive methods are used to interpret comments posted on the five most viewed Das Racist videos. Given the dearth of literature exploring YouTube’s comment space, this study serves as a critical means to further understand race and the production and consumption of YouTube comments in everyday online encounters. We visualized networked antagonisms, which were found to be significantly racialized, and entangled with other expressions of hostility. YouTube comments are often perceived as individual, random insults or only generalized expressions of ‘hate’. Our study provides probes deeper and discovers that racialized expressions also involved networked interactions, where hostile ideas, passed through multiple parts of the comment network, both intra-/inter- video.