Andrea Jones-Rooy

You're just absolutely lying.

Which I didn't know until yesterday.

Steve, you and Ian were talking about UAPs and I thought it was the United Auto Parts or something like that.

Oh my God.

Totally different.

So shout out to their new branding because I didn't know what they were talking about.

I would love to tell you.

In fact, we're going to demonstrate it live and just suck Steve's brain out via YouTube.

As ever, I'm coming with a cheerful political science topic.

It is hot off the presses.

So this is a paper, and at least in the political science world, a recent paper could be something that came out anywhere between now and 18 months ago.

But this came out on the 10th of June, so one week ago.

And it came out in the journal Political Communication.

It's currently not behind a paywall, so go read it.

And it is called Evaluating Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Radicalization Pathways on YouTube.

And it's a study that attempts to finally

untangle the relationship between understanding whether it's YouTube that draws people down into radicalization pathways, or is it users are selecting among videos and taking themselves down and YouTube is just sort of the more neutral, well, if they like this, they like that.

And until now, we didn't really have a method that could meaningfully help us disentangle this endogeneity, this are people watching, ending up watching radical videos on YouTube because they are open to or interested in radical views or because YouTube is recommending radical views.

And most research would simply track things like watch time or videos watched and show that they become more radical, but it's not necessarily clear how or

or who's driving it, the person, the algorithm, or some combination.