Tue Feb 01 05:21:23 +0000 2022

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Some more preliminary findings from my adventures in crawling Apple Podcasts. For the following Qanon adjacent pods, let's see how many suggestions it takes before they're recommended:

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Quick recap: when you visit a podcast page in Apple Podcasts, you get a list of suggestions of other podcasts you may be interested in.

What I'm interested in, is how many clicks it takes to go from suggestions for a mainstream podcast before you're suggested fringe content

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So using Qanon podcast the X22 report as an example, we can get there in 3 clicks if we start from the Dan Bongino show:

Bongino-> Bannon’s War Room -> X22 Report

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We'll start by looking at chains that are 3 leaps or fewer. You may notice that Bannon's War Room is a pretty effective funnel to Qanon content.

The 'user ratings' count next to the pod title is number of user reviews a podcast has. I'm using that to help illustrate popularity

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What this effectively means is that any podcast that suggests Bannon's War Room will get you to fringe content pretty quickly.

How many podcasts suggests Bannon's War Room?

I've counted 56 in my dataset

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The 'slot number' in here refers to the position the podcast will show up in the suggestions carousel. So for example Poso's Human Events Daily shows War Room as the first suggestion

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The number of paths to get to fringe content grows significantly if we go from 3 to 5 leaps. Like so significantly can't I reasonably display the results in a twitter thread