The role played by YouTube's recommendation algorithm in unwittingly promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories is not entirely understood. Yet, this can have dire real-world consequences, especially when pseudoscientific content is promoted to users at critical times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we set out to characterize and detect pseudoscientific misinformation on YouTube. We collect 6.6K videos related to COVID-19, the Flat Earth theory, as well as the anti-vaccination and anti-mask movements. Using crowdsourcing, we annotate them as pseudoscience, legitimate science, or irrelevant and train a deep learning classifier to detect pseudoscientific videos with an accuracy of 0.79.

We quantify user exposure to this content on various parts of the platform and how this exposure changes based on the user's watch history. We find that YouTube suggests more pseudoscientific content regarding traditional pseudoscientific topics (e.g., flat earth, anti-vaccination) than for emerging ones (like COVID-19). At the same time, these recommendations are more common on the search results page than on a user's homepage or in the recommendation section when actively watching videos. Finally, we shed light on how a user's watch history substantially affects the type of recommended videos.

"It is just a flu": Assessing the Effect of Watch History on YouTube's Pseudoscientific Video Recommendations

The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood-thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic “drops” of information from an anonymous insider calling themself Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump is leading them in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how the theory evolved and spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms.

To address this gap, we study QAnon from the perspective of “Q” themself. We build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six “aggregation sites,” which curate
and archive them from their original posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have a relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the Q drops’ contents to identify topics of discussion and find statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q drops to wider audiences. We find that dissemination was (initially) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the “gospel” of Q persists on the Web.

The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information



**Session Chair:** Nicolas Pröllochs

s3-4: Recommender systems

technical paper

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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.


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ICWSM 2022

The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

Emiliano De Cristofaro

2

2

Presentations

"It is just a flu": Assessing the Effect of Watch History on YouTube's Pseudoscientific Video Recommendations

The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

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