A concern among content moderation researchers is that hard moderation
measures, such as banning content producers, will push users to more extreme
information environments. Research in this area is still new, but predominately
focuses on one-way migration (from mainstream to alt-tech) due to this concern.
However, content producers on alt-tech social media platforms are not always
banned users from mainstream platforms, instead they may be co-active across
platforms. We explore co-activity on two such platforms: YouTube and BitChute.
Specifically, we describe differences in video production across 27 co-active
channels. We find that the majority of channels use significantly more moral
and political words in their video titles on BitChute than in their video
titles on YouTube. However, the reasoning for this shift seems to be different
across channels. In some cases, we find that channels produce videos on
different sets of topics across the platforms, often producing content on
BitChute that would likely be moderated on YouTube. In rare cases, we find
video titles of the same video change across the platforms. Overall, there is
not a consistent trend across co-active channels in our sample, suggesting that
the production on alt-tech social media platforms does not fit a single
narrative.Comment: This is a MeLa Lab Technical Repor