Dataset for: "It is just a flu: Assessing the Effect of Watch History on YouTube's Pseudoscientific Video Recommendations"

The dataset consists of three files: the metadata, comments, and captions of the ground-truth dataset videos collected and manually reviewed in this paper.

1. Video Metadata:
2. "groundtruth_videos.json": Contains the metadata of our manually reviewed ground-truth dataset videos. The ground-truth dataset includes 1,197 science, 1,325 pseudoscience, and 3,212 irrelevant videos. More specifically, it includes the metadata of videos related to the following pseudoscientific topics:
3. COVID-19: (607 science, 368 pseudoscience, 721 irrelevant videos)
4. Anti-vaccination (363 science, 394 pseudoscience, and 1,060 irrelevant videos)
5. Anti-mask (65 science, 188 pseudoscience, and 724 irrelevant videos)
6. Flat Earth (162 science, 375 pseudoscience, and 707 irrelevant videos)

Note, that 600 of the videos in this dataset include the "annotation.manual_review_label" attribute, which is the label assigned by the first author of this paper to evaluate the performance of the crowdsourced annotation process.

• Video Metadata Description:
• "search_term": The search terms used to search YouTube and retrieve these videos during our data collection. It can be one of the following search terms: 'covid-19', 'coronavirus', 'anti-vaccination', 'anti-vaxx', 'anti-mask', or 'flat earth'.
• "annotation.annotations": The list of the three annotations assigned to each video by our crowdsourced annotators.
• "annotation.label": The annotation label assigned to the video based on the majority agreement of the crowdsourced annotators.
• "annotation.manual_review_label": The label assigned by the first author of this paper to evaluate the performance of the crowdsourced annotation process.
• "isSeed": 0 if the video is a seed video of our data collection, 1 if it is a recommended video of a seed video.

• "relatedVideos": The recommended videos of the given video as returned by the YouTube Data API.

• Video Comments:

• "groundtruth_videos_comments_ids.json": Includes the identifiers of the comments of our ground-truth videos.

• Video Transcripts:

• "groundtruth_videos_transcripts.json": Includes the captions of our ground-truth videos. If you use this dataset in any publication, of any form and kind, please cite using this data.