The Role of YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm in the Radicalisation of Portuguese Users towards the Far-Right Vanessa Montinho (Swansea University) Abstract: The Portuguese far-right has been expanding its political influence through the use of social media, which has led to increasing concerns regarding the risk of online radicalisation and extreme right-wing terrorism in the Portuguese context. Furthermore, social media recommendation algorithms have been highly criticised due to evidence found that they progressively recommend more extremist material to users who interact with it, which might contribute to users’ radicalisation. Therefore, this paper empirically analyses whether YouTube’s recommendation algorithms contribute to the radicalisation of Portuguese users towards the far-right. It aims to answer the following research questions: RQ1. Do YouTube’s algorithms recommend increasingly extremist videos to Portuguese users?; and, RQ2. Does extremist content rank higher in recommendations after users interact with it? To do this, the study recreated the conditions in which Portuguese users might find themselves when using the platform and analysed the personalised recommendations YouTube offers them.
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