Subject Guides: Social Media Research: YouTube

YouTube TOS and API

Like many social media platform providers, Google's TOS for YouTube contains restrictions on the usage of automated web scraping tools. The API, however, is less locked down than Meta's platforms Instagram and Facebook. YouTube has been successfully studied by researchers, albiet to a lesser degree than the text-based and easily available Twitter.

The YouTube API allows for automatic searching and collection of videos and video metadata. It is well-documented and there are non-coding free tools available to work with it.

Tools for YouTube research

Netlytic
Netlytic is a browser-based social media research tool that has text mining and network visualization features. Works with Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds, and Reddit. Free accounts are sufficient for most student purposes. Netlytic has a YouTube channel with demonstrations for a variety of types of project.
Mozdeh
Mozdeh is a social media quantitative analysis FOSS software that can also collect tweets, like Netlytic or Chorus. It works with the same things as Netlyltic: Tweets, YouTube comments, Reddit comments, and manually imported data. Unlike Netlytic, it is a desktop app. It also has a YouTube channel where you can find guides to collecting and analyzing data.
Reaper
Reaper, built on the socialreaper Python library, is a desktop app with no coding required. While it calls what it does "scraping", it makes use of site APIs and the user will need to register for an API key for any site they want to use Reaper on. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr, and Pinterest. It outputs all data as .csv tabular files.
NCapture
NCapture is a Chrome extension that allows users to manually create text datasets from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as capture YouTube videos for analysis in NVivo. *Only able to be used with NVivo - not an option otherwise*.

Voxgov This link opens in a new window
Voxgov provides real-time access to social media feeds, press releases, publications, and documents from the federal government, It has built-in features for working with government social media, including creating .csv datasets from search results, creating graphs for how frequently your search terms were used by government accounts, most commonly associated terms or people, and more! *AU community only*

Example publications in YouTube research

“Down the Rabbit Hole” of Vaccine Misinformation on YouTube: Network Exposure Study
ABSTRACT: Social media platforms such as YouTube are hotbeds for the spread of misinformation about vaccines. The aim of this study was to explore how individuals are exposed to antivaccine misinformation on YouTube based on whether they start their viewing from a keyword-based search or from antivaccine seed videos.
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Four networks of videos based on YouTube recommendations were collected in November 2019. Two search networks were created from provaccine and antivaccine keywords to resemble goal-oriented browsing. Two seed networks were constructed from conspiracy and antivaccine expert seed videos to resemble direct navigation. Video contents and network structures were analyzed using the network exposure model. Viewers are more likely to encounter antivaccine videos through direct navigation starting from an antivaccine video than through goal-oriented browsing. In the two seed networks, provaccine videos, antivaccine videos, and videos containing health misinformation were all found to be more likely to lead to more antivaccine videos. YouTube has boosted the search rankings of provaccine videos to combat the influence of antivaccine information. However, when viewers are directed to antivaccine videos on YouTube from another site, the recommendation algorithm is still likely to expose them to additional antivaccine information.