Examining the Production of Co-active Channels on YouTube and BitChute

Abstract: A concern among content moderation researchers is that hard moderation measures, such as banning content producers, will push users to more extreme information environments. Research in this area is still new, but predominately focuses on one-way migration (from mainstream to alt-tech) due to this concern. However, content producers on alt-tech social media platforms are not always banned users from mainstream platforms, instead they may be co-active across platforms. We explore co-activity on two such platforms: YouTube and BitChute. Specifically, we describe differences in video production across 27 co-active channels. We find that the majority of channels use significantly more moral and political words in their video titles on BitChute than in their video titles on YouTube. However, the reasoning for this shift seems to be different across channels. In some cases, we find that channels produce videos on different sets of topics across the platforms, often producing content on BitChute that would likely be moderated on YouTube. In rare cases, we find video titles of the same video change across the platforms. Overall, there is not a consistent trend across co-active channels in our sample, suggesting that the production on alt-tech social media platforms does not fit a single narrative.