Supply and Demand on Alt-Tech Social Media: A Case Study of BitChute

As media platforms continue to develop content moderation policies, alternative platforms have emerged as safe havens for deplatformed content. As these alternatives to major media platforms grow, the importance of understanding their role in the media ecosystem grows too. In this paper, we perform a longitudinal study of the content dynamics of one such alternative media platform, BitChute. BitChute is an alternative video-hosting site similar to YouTube. We first theorize what technological affordances may drive the supply and demand of content on BitChute. We then test those theories through an analysis of 6,363,596 videos from 82,162 channels, which were viewed 2,868,117,905 times, over 54 months. We find that BitChute’s minimal content moderation drives much of the content supply and demand. Videos which were more offensive, certain, and covered commonly deplatformed topics were most popular. In particular, we find that BitChute fills a demand gap created by moderation policies on major media platforms around COVID-19 and - to a lesser extent - elections fraud. The most popular videos on the platform were re-uploaded videos that were banned by YouTube and Facebook. As a whole, our results suggest that BitChute’s current role is less as a town square and more as a backup for deplatformed video content.