Conclusion

in this project a dataset containing 406,242 comments from 500 videos of the “tagesschau” YouTube channel have been analysed to find out how people from the lateral thinking movement dominate the comments section. First, the research question was described in more detail and sub-questions were posed for individual sub-aspects. Afterwards, an attempt was made to answer these questions using various methods from the field of computational communication science. For this purpose, the individual methods were presented in more detail and a detailed description was given of how they were used.

With the help of the LDA model, it was possible to identify various topics in the comments and with the help of the dictionary analysis, it was possible to gain an overview of how large the proportion of comments from the lateral thinking movement is. Although the results of these analyses must be viewed critically, they allow the conclusion that comments from the lateral thinking movement are dominant in the comments section. The result of the sentiment analysis, that the overall sentiment is negative, supports this conclusion. Finally, the political direction of the comments was examined and each comment was assigned a party. The result was that especially conservative and extreme political views are strongly overrepresented.

In summary, it can be said that the comments under the videos of the “tagesschau” channel are dominated by comments of the lateral thinking movement. Although it is difficult to say exactly how strong this dominance is, it is clear that there is an overrepresentation of comments that can be attributed to this movement.