Does YouTube shape conspiracy mentality? A three-way interaction effect of partisan YouTube channel use, like-Minded discussion, and interest in politics

Summary

Note: the structured summary provided describes a paper on Brazilian parliamentarians’ Twitter use during the Manaus Covid-19 crisis, which does not match the listed title about YouTube and conspiracy mentality. The note below reflects the substantive content of the structured summary.

The paper analyzes how Brazilian federal deputies used Twitter/X to contest narratives during the December 2020–March 2021 collapse of Manaus’s healthcare system. Combining network analysis with qualitative and quantitative textual analysis of 47,728 tweets from 450 deputies, the authors identify three distinct modes of political narrative construction that correspond to competing claims to epistemic authority — objectivity, authority, and proximity. They argue that politicians actively compete with journalists for gatekeeping positions in hybrid media environments, appropriating or rejecting journalistic conventions depending on their political alignment.

Key Contributions

• Introduces the concept of “derivative reporting” — politicians curating and repackaging journalistic content to borrow press credibility for partisan ends.
• Proposes a typology of three epistemic claims used by political elites: objectivity (via news curation), authority (via state institutional access), and proximity (via firsthand experience).
• Extends gatekeeping theory to non-journalistic actors competing for gatekeeper roles.
• Provides empirical insight into Latin American political communication, an underrepresented context in hybrid media systems research.
• Demonstrates how network analysis can map political alliances in fragmented multiparty systems like Brazil’s.

Methods

The authors collected 47,728 tweets from 450 federal deputies (88% of the Chamber) and used word embeddings plus pointwise mutual information to identify Manaus-related content. Network analysis in Gephi (eigenvector centrality, ForceAtlas2 layout, Louvain community detection at resolution 1.5) on @mention patterns revealed political clusters. The top 10 most central accounts from each of three groups (pro-government, anti-government, and Amazonas-state deputies) were content-analyzed. An inductive codebook on praise, blame, and thematic features was applied to 4,427 posts by two coders (98% agreement; Brennan-Prediger’s κ = .96). Qualitative textual analysis complemented the quantitative patterns, framed as computational grounded theory.

Findings

• Network analysis revealed two main clusters — an anti-government red cluster (1168 nodes, 77 deputies) and a pro-government blue cluster (824 nodes, 126 deputies) — with very low density (0.001), indicating fragmented conversation.
• The opposition red cluster was more prolific (17,719 tweets; ~272 per deputy); 41% blamed the Bolsonaro administration and 10% called for impeachment.
• Red-cluster deputies sourced heavily from news outlets (6 of top 10 URL domains) and emulated journalistic visual formats — headlines, logos, breaking-news aesthetics — while ideologically reframing the content.
• Pro-government blue cluster largely severed ties with mainstream media, attacked press credibility, linked to video streaming and political accounts, and treated state communications as authoritative truth.
• 24.4% of blue-cluster tweets praised Bolsonaro; blame was deflected toward the Supreme Court and state-level corruption.
• Amazonas local parliamentarians rarely assigned blame (9%) or praise (5%); 13.2% publicized their own actions, foregrounding brokerage with constituents and foreign officials — a proximity-based narrative strategy.

Connections

No other papers have been registered under shared topics, so there are no internal wikilinks to draw here. Conceptually, the paper sits at the intersection of hybrid media systems (Chadwick), networked gatekeeping (Meraz & Papacharissi), and the epistemic-crisis literature (Waisbord; Benkler et al.), and would connect naturally to future notes on populist media strategies, journalistic authority contestation, and Latin American political communication.

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