Audience Engagement with Political Messaging on YouTube Shorts (Student Abstract)

This study investigates user engagement and political polarization on YouTube Shorts, a special category of YouTube videos with a duration of 15-60 seconds. Via a substantial corpus of 38,838 videos gleaned from 100 YouTube channels focusing on political content, we contrast YouTube Shorts with long-form content in terms of user engagement, content toxicity, and polarization. Our analyses reveal that (1) YouTube Shorts receive more likes and views and fewer comments as compared to their long-form video counterparts; (2) YouTube Shorts are more toxic; and (3) considerably more polarized than long-form YouTube videos.