The “hot topics”

Introduction

The next step was to understand what are the most discussed topics by the Youtube users in order to analyze the themes around what revolves the controversy. The previous analysis allowed us to grap the existence of "hot topics": anonimity, censorship, legality, crime, freedom, security, technology and From the Deep Web, for those video illustrating multimedia materials taken directly from the Deep Web. The aim is to understand how users Youtube behave in relation to these hot topics.

How to read the visualization

The network provides the amount of videos that deal with a certain subject and the type of video that corresponds to them. The external labels represent the hot topics instead the nodes in the network illustrate the video. The color has been used to distinguish the video typology and the size indicates the amount of video present for that particular typology. The nodes placement in the network shows respectively how a cluster of video talks about a specific topic rather than another one. Considering the case of video typology VLOG, we can see how in this kind of people, video producers talk about several subjects, in fact clusters tend to assume a central position in the network and only in some cases some of this tending towards a specific topic.

How it has been done

We took the videos in English for both our queries and created a Nodes Table and a Edges Table linking the videos (categorized by alignment, fruition and starting query) to the tags related to their topic (the only ones with labels). So we proceeded to create a network graph with Gephi importing the two tables, spatializing by Circular Layout and Force Atlas 2 and colouring the nodes according to its "Typology".Once again, the query Deep Web shows very varied results as opposed to Tor Browser which has a prevalence of tutorials and screenshots. Deep web shows much more graphic and processed images, a demonstration that people are more active also in the visual imaginary creation. Further evidence that users of Youtube are informed about the meaning of the two terms to which associate a particular visual imagery.

Findings

The network shows the most discussed topics: anonymity, security and technology, followed by legality. Anonymity in fact plays a crucial role in the controversy. It 'a topic as related to technology (Tor browser guarantees anonymity to its users) as it is a reason of general interest to more abstract discussions about the good or bad use of this tool. It is also interesting to notice that the video typology Tutorial producers talks especially about technology and anonymity, the Talk producers about security, Amateur Documentary producers about legality. Generally the rest of the network is quite varied. Security is a topic abundantly discussed. This is why recently, as a result of operations conducted by the FBI, were discovered the names of alleged owners of illegal Tor Browser website in. This has led to mixed feelings among Tor Browser users: those concerned about their privacy and who seeks to reaffirm the security that this tool offers. Equally interesting is the topic legality: Tor Browser is considered legal, however the criminal actions performed within it, for the most part are illegal and fought by different government agencies.

Metadata

Timestamp: 20/11/2014 - 18/12/2014

Data source: Youtube

Related Protocol

Download data (16,2 KB)