Mapping Polarized News Ecosystems on YouTube: Legacy Vs Digital, Evidence from India

The increasing polarization within India’s media landscape necessitates empirical investigation into how legacy and digital media differ in content strategies and audience engagement. This study examines the distinct operational patterns between legacy and digital media in India’s increasingly polarized news landscape. Using computational methods, we analyzed 1,074 YouTube news videos and over 400,000 user comments to address critical research gaps in understanding how institutional origins shape content strategies and audience engagement within platform environments. The analysis reveals that legacy media predominantly features government-aligned narratives and polarizing Hindu-Muslim issues, while digital media cover a broader range of socioeconomic issues, civil movements, and public concerns. Audience/Users engagement mirrors this division. While English comments show comparable levels of toxicity across both media types, Hindi comments on digital media markedly more toxic, suggesting more contentious vernacular discussions. Network analysis further demonstrates the polarization among users, with only 2.7% of users engaging across both, a structural marker of echo chambers. These findings highlight how media ownership structures and platform dynamics intersect to reinforce polarization and shaping the public discourse in the world’s largest democracy.