Investigating Dynamics of Polarization of YouTube True and Fake News Channels

In the era of the information age where information is easily accessible and shared over the internet it has become increasingly difficult for people to judge whether the news is authentic or fake. The concept of fake news is not new, it has been going on for decades in the context of religious figures, politicians, and celebrities involved in the spread of misinformation. However, with the advent of the concept of channels, the owners of social media channels have started posting fake or controversial topics to increase the subscribers and viewership. The video-sharing and viewing platform, YouTube has increased in popularity in recent years for entertainment and news purposes. Thus, it has become crucial for controlling the spread of fake information as people subscribed to a particular channel would see more polarization as increased notifications of that channel go to its subscribers which generally superimpose the viewpoints of the channel onto its subscribers and other viewers. In this chapter, we try to analyze the behavior of users in fake news channels. After epidemiological modeling of users in both fake news channel and authentic news channel we deduce the movement of users from viewers to subscribers in that channel using the transfer coefficient values calculated from our model. From our study we find that there is enhanced polarization of views in case of fake news, and the chances of a person subscribing to a fake news is quite high once exposed as compared to true news channel.