Exploring YouTube's Political Communication Networks during the 2024 French Elections

2025-12-04

AI Summary

This study investigates the mechanisms of news-media–politician interaction on YouTube during the 2024 French elections and their impact on cross-ideological user engagement. Leveraging a large-scale dataset comprising 435,000 videos and 7.4 million comments from 35 media outlets and 28 politicians, it integrates network analysis and engagement modeling to examine upload behavior, comment network structure, and intergroup interaction patterns. Results show that left- and right-wing channels exhibit significantly higher activity and user retention than centrist ones; only 7% of cross-ideological commenters drive the majority of such interactions; far-right and left-wing content attracts greater viewership and denser comment communities; mainstream media favor ideologically homogeneous guest lineups, whereas politician appearances substantially increase cross-partisan user participation. The study provides the first quantitative evidence of how “media–politician co-dissemination” on short-video platforms mitigates political polarization—offering novel empirical insights for digital public sphere research.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Voting
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

In 2024, France was shaken by the far-right National Rally's victory in the European elections. In response to this unprecedented result, French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly, triggering legislative elections just two weeks later. A whirlwind campaign followed, partly on social media, as is now the norm, and concluded with the victory of a left-wing coalition. This article examines the YouTube activity of two key actors during this period, news media and politicians, and the commenting behavior they generated. We built a dataset of 35 news media channels, 28 politicians and parties channels, 43.5k videos posted from three months before the European elections to one week after the second round of the legislative elections, and 7.4M associated comments. We examined upload activity and engagement across political orientations and used network analysis methods to uncover the structure of their commenting communities. We also identified politicians' appearances on news media channels and assessed their impact on commenting user bases. Our findings show that, among politicians and parties channels, far-right and left-wing ones were significantly more active and received substantially higher engagement (views, likes, and comments) than other groups, with denser and more clustered commenting communities. About 7% of commenters commented across political orientations and were much more active than in-group commenters. News media channels tended to favor politically aligned guests, while centrist politicians were over-represented. Finally, politicians' presence in the videos of a specific news media channel increased the share of commenters who were active on this channel and political channels, regardless of their orientation.

Problem

• Analyzes YouTube political communication networks during 2024 French elections
• Examines video and comment activity of news media and politicians
• Investigates commenting communities and cross-orientation user engagement

Innovation

• Network analysis of YouTube commenting communities
• Dataset of 43.5k videos and 7.4M comments
• Examined cross-orientation commenter activity and impact