Supply and Demand on Alt-Tech Social Media: A Case Study of BitChute

Benjamin D. Horne, Milo Z Trujillo, Mauricio Gruppi, Cody Buntain

Abstract:

As media platforms continue to develop content moderation policies,
alternative platforms have emerged as safe havens for deplatformed content.
As these alternatives to major media platforms grow, the importance of
understanding their role in the media ecosystem grows too. In this paper, we
perform a longitudinal study of the content dynamics of one such alternative
media platform, BitChute. BitChute is an alternative video-hosting site similar to YouTube. We first theorize what technological affordances may drive
the supply and demand of content on BitChute. We then test those theories
through an analysis of 6,363,596 videos from 82,162 channels, which were
viewed 2,868,117,905 times, over 54 months. We find that BitChute’s minimal
content moderation drives much of the content supply and demand. Videos
which were more offensive, certain, and covered commonly deplatformed
topics were most popular. In particular, we find that BitChute fills a demand
gap created by moderation policies on major media platforms around
COVID-19 and - to a lesser extent - elections fraud. The most popular videos
on the platform were re-uploaded videos that were banned by YouTube
and Facebook. As a whole, our results suggest that BitChute’s current role
is less as a town square and more as a backup for deplatformed video content.