Hello everyone. I am happy to present our paper "#StayHome #WithMe: How Do YouTubers Help with COVID-19 Loneliness?"
Loneliness is a severe side effect caused
by COVID-19 social distancing. YouTube called on creators to join the #StayHome #WithMe movement by
creating content that will entertain, inform, and connect with people who are socially distancing.
This hashtag movement witnessed a 600% increase in YouTube viewership.
Contrary to other social media platforms, YouTubers interact with viewers through
parasocial relationships, the one-sided intimacy generated by conversational give and take.
However, little is known about how parasocial relationships with YouTubers
are embodied during an ongoing pandemic. To fill this knowledge gap, 1642 videos made by
creators in the United States were annotated on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each video was
annotated by 3 or 5 MTurk participants. Three research questions are addressed. First, what
#StayHome #WithMe videos did YouTubers make and how they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic?
Second, how did #StayHome #WithMe videos offer social provisions?
And last, how did videos with different social provisions affect viewer engagement?
Grounded theory approach identifies nine video styles to encode #StayHome #WithMe videos:
artistic, challenge, chatting, game, homelife, how-to,
religious, review and story. To investigate how COVID-19 affects
video creation, we annotate the degree to which each video mentions COVID-19.
Weiss's loneliness theory is utilized for encoding the roles of YouTubers.
Attachment is a social provision that provides a sense of safety and security.
Social integration is a provision to share interests and concerns.
Reassurance of worth emphasizes one's skills, knowledge, and abilities.
Reliable alliance is a provision which the person can count on under any circumstances.
Guidance is a provision through which people obtain advice and direction.
Opportunity for nurturance is a provision in which the person feels
responsible for another's wellbeing. This work uses popularity, activity, and
comment emotion to measure how social interaction on YouTube is affected by social provisions.
Popularity is measured by view count, comment count, and like count. Activity is measured
by the number of likes and comments a video received per 100 views. Comment emotion is
measured by positive and negative comments. RQ1 probes what #StayHome #WithMe videos were created and
how they relate to the pandemic. The five most common video styles are how-to video,
artistic video, homelife video, chatting video, and game video.
The videos did not intensively mention the pandemic. The average
rating of COVID-19 mentioning was between "none" and "low".
RQ2 finds that social integration and guidance were the most-supported provisions.
Except for religious videos, 49% of videos in all other styles provided social integration.
Guidance was only significantly associated with how-to videos.
Attachment and reassurance of worth had a similar amount of videos. Chatting, homelife,
and religious videos had significantly higher proportions providing attachment.
Artistic is the only video style positively associated with reassurance of worth.
The fewest videos supported opportunity for nurturance and reliable alliance. Homelife,
chatting, and religious videos had significantly more videos with nurturance or alliance.
For RQ3, videos in how-to, homelife, and review attracted more comments by providing attachment,
nurturance, or reassurance. Offering alliance and nurturance
helped how-to videos to gain more likes and artistic videos to gain more comments.
Viewers' comments in videos that mentioned COVID-19 were more negative.
Meanwhile, religious and homelife videos had significantly higher positive word frequencies.
In summary, #StayHome #WithMe YouTubers did not alarm the disaster like Twitter and Facebook.
Instead, YouTubers de-escalate disaster attention and prioritize connection.
YouTubers mitigate disaster loneliness by sharing entertaining content to provide social
integration, teaching skills to provide guidance, and showing at-home activities or chatting.
#StayHome #WithMe videos that supply attachment, nurturance, and alliance had higher overall viewer
engagement. However, they were also among the least provided social provisions.
We suggest that the non-disaster-focused videos can support viewers who need to relax and reduce
loneliness during crises. This characteristic of YouTube should be leveraged in future designs.
Viewers can find YouTubers who imitate friend-, mentor-, and family-like connections to mitigate
loneliness. Social integration was the most prevalent social provision. People who miss
mentor-like relationships can leverage how-to videos to learn various skills and knowledge.
Videos of homelife activities or chatting with the audience
can engender attachment and nurturance.
Lastly, YouTubers should consider providing more family-like provisions to increase viewers'
interactions and positivity in the parasocial relationships.