Zero-shot text LLMs detect conspiracy YouTube videos with high recall but low precision, a fine-tuned RoBERTa remains competitive, and thumbnails add little value.
YouNICon: YouTube's CommuNIty of Conspiracy Videos
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abstract
Conspiracy theories are widely propagated on social media. Among various social media services, YouTube is one of the most influential sources of news and entertainment. This paper seeks to develop a dataset, YOUNICON, to enable researchers to perform conspiracy theory detection as well as classification of videos with conspiracy theories into different topics. YOUNICON is a dataset with a large collection of videos from suspicious channels that were identified to contain conspiracy theories in a previous study (Ledwich and Zaitsev 2020). Overall, YOUNICON will enable researchers to study trends in conspiracy theories and understand how individuals can interact with the conspiracy theory producing community or channel. Our data is available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7466262.
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Evaluating AI capabilities in detecting conspiracy theories on YouTube
Zero-shot text LLMs detect conspiracy YouTube videos with high recall but low precision, a fine-tuned RoBERTa remains competitive, and thumbnails add little value.