Abstract
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.
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