Exploring Audience Reactions on YouTube: An Approach to Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis

André Rollwagen, André Rollwagen, Gabriel Zurawski, Stefano Carraro, Roberto Tietzmann, Marcelo C. Fontoura, Isabel Manssour

2025

Abstract

Social media platforms like YouTube have become central spaces for public expression, allowing users to share their emotional reactions and, at times, toxic content. Understanding these reactions requires scalable and reproducible approaches that can handle informal, user-generated content. This paper presents an integrated approach for analyzing sentiment polarity and detecting toxic speech in YouTube video comments written in Portuguese. For this, we developed a set of Python scripts that automate data collection and apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to perform both tasks. These scripts are publicly available and can be adapted for use in various video and social analysis contexts. Interactive visualizations were also generated to support the interpretation of results. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated through two case studies involving highly controversial videos, which allow us to explore the relationship between sentiment, toxicity, and audience engagement patterns. The results provide valuable insights into the dynamics of public discourse and offer tools for future research on audience speech analysis on YouTube.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Rollwagen A., Zurawski G., Carraro S., Tietzmann R., Fontoura M. and Manssour I. (2025). Exploring Audience Reactions on YouTube: An Approach to Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST; ISBN 978-989-758-772-6, SciTePress, pages 481-488. DOI: 10.5220/0013718200003985

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist25,
author={André Rollwagen and Gabriel Zurawski and Stefano Carraro and Roberto Tietzmann and Marcelo Fontoura and Isabel Manssour},
title={Exploring Audience Reactions on YouTube: An Approach to Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST},
year={2025},
pages={481-488},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013718200003985},
isbn={978-989-758-772-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST
TI - Exploring Audience Reactions on YouTube: An Approach to Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis
SN - 978-989-758-772-6
AU - Rollwagen A.
AU - Zurawski G.
AU - Carraro S.
AU - Tietzmann R.
AU - Fontoura M.
AU - Manssour I.
PY - 2025
SP - 481
EP - 488
DO - 10.5220/0013718200003985
PB - SciTePress