A focused crawler for mining hate and extremism promoting videos on YouTube.
Swati Agarwal, Ashish Sureka · 2014
Online video sharing platforms such as YouTube contains several videos and users promoting hate and extremism. Due to low barrier to publication and anonymity, YouTube is misused as a platform by some users and communities to post negative videos disseminating hatred against a particular religion, country or person. We formulate the problem of identification of such malicious videos as a search problem and present a focused-crawler based approach consisting of various components performing several tasks: search strategy or algorithm, node similarity computation metric, learning from exemplary profiles serving as training data, stopping criterion, node classifier and queue manager. We implement a best-first search algorithm and conduct experiments to measure the accuracy of the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective.