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Article History

Received: 8 August 2025

Accepted: 31 May 2026

First Online: 12 June 2026

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: We confirm that this research was performed in accordance with Cardiff University’s policies, procedures and guidance at all times, including, but not limited to, its Policy on the Ethical Conduct of Research involving Human Participants, Human Material or Human Data and our Research Integrity and Governance Code of Practice. Name of the approval body: the ENCAP Research Ethics Committee, Cardiff University. Approval ID: 231020ENCAP_KrykoniukRoberts. 20 October 2023. Scope of approval: The ethics approval covers the entire research project.

: This study does not involve human participants but does involve human data collected from the ‘comments’ sections of YouTube videos. Informed consent was not required, as the study used data drawn exclusively from publicly available YouTube comments. In addition, specific YouTube users have not been targeted in this research, as we were interested in a general picture that emerges from the analysis of all English comments related to specific news. Upon download, the data was immediately anonymised by automatically removing YouTube handles from the data and replacing them with irreversible hashes (essentially random IDs). The YouTube comments were collected by the lead researchers (PI and Co-Investigator) using automatic means (the YouTube API). The data was transferred from the YouTube servers via a secure, encrypted connection into a secure, password-protected computer with an encrypted hard drive. The password to access the decrypted data was only held by the data scraper (PI or Co-Investigator). Additionally, the data taggers went through the data and redacted comments that contained personal or confidential information. None of the YouTube data was released.