For this example, we are interested in exploring the issue of mail-in ballots. Now choose an issue you would like to query. For this recipe, we have chosen 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board, indicated on 4CAT by the abbreviation “/pol”. Choose a board or subreddit within your chosen platform. Remember: the intention is to map the “YouTube diet” of communities spreading conspiracy theories and other misinformation, so you first need to determine the issue you want to investigate for example, anti-vaccination narratives or rumors.Ģ. On 4CAT, choose 4chan, 8chan, 8kun, Reddit or any other source of YouTube URLs you want as datasets.
#Find a particular video on youtube how to
All you need is a basic knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet.ġ. The following recipe details how you can do this without having to be an experienced coder. But this would likely be tedious, time-consuming and likely result in more media news YouTube channels that may be talking about mail-in ballots, but are not necessarily spreading falsehoods.Ī more streamlined approach would be to turn to 4chan, Reddit or 8kun - online spaces known for their divisive and problematic content - and scrape YouTube URLs from posts related to mail-in ballots. Whether you are monitoring misinformation on YouTube around a political wedge issue, tracking the spread of a particular conspiracy, or strengthening your Boolean search queries by better understanding the vernacular of a particular community, the following recipe gives you the tools and methods to supercharge your monitoring and online investigations into problematic YouTube videos shared across a range of fringe platforms.Īs a journalist, what if you were interested in investigating misleading or false claims on YouTube around mail-in ballots, for example? How would you go about finding these videos? You could manually search the YouTube platform. It is designed to lift the lid on advanced social media analysis. This recipe is the third in our Digital Investigations Recipe Series, a collaboration between the Public Data Lab, Digital Methods Initiative, Open Intelligence Lab and First Draft.