Commenting Patterns on YouTube during the COP26 Summit

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over the course of the event, and from this also examined the network of interactions between videos and comments, and comments and further replies; the eventual network around 18,000 videos contained 70 connected communities.

Key YouTube channels included BBC News, DW News, Sky News (UK), CNBC, and others; most professional news corporations used the event to move their content from their mainstream news channels to their YouTube channels; as the host broadcaster, BBC News in particular ran a number of livestreams that were widely viewed. Climate activists and hobbyist journalists were especially prominent in commenting on these videos, while the news organisations were largely uninvolved in the commenting threads. This demonstrates these new outlets’ opinion leadership during the coverage of the summit on YouTube, Christian says.