In Times of Crisis: An Exploratory Study of Media and Political Discourse on YouTube During the 2024 French Elections

2025-12-19

AI Summary

This study investigates how political actors and news media shaped public discourse on YouTube during the 2024 French elections. Methodologically, it introduces a novel semi-automated analytical framework—integrating LLM-based topic modeling, unsupervised clustering, and expert human validation—applied to over 100,000 videos from 74 French-language channels, jointly analyzing video metadata and transcribed content. Key contributions include: (1) empirical evidence of pronounced thematic polarization between left- and right-wing outlets (e.g., immigration vs. protest rights/media freedom); (2) a robust inverse relationship between topic polarization and user engagement metrics—highly polarized content significantly increased comment volume but reduced like rates; (3) non-political content (e.g., nature, gaming) achieved substantially higher user approval; and (4) pervasive neutral or critical narrative framing of political figures across the platform. The study delivers a reproducible methodological paradigm and empirically grounded insights into platform-mediated electoral discourse dynamics.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Voting

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Topic discovery and tracking
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems

Abstract

YouTube has emerged as a major platform for political communication and news dissemination, particularly during high-stakes electoral periods. In the context of the 2024 European Parliament and French legislative elections, this study investigates how political actors and news media used YouTube to shape public discourse. We analyze over 100,000 video transcripts and metadata from 74 French YouTube channels operated by national news outlets, local media, and political figures. To identify the key themes emphasized during the campaign period, we applied a semi-automated method that combined large language models with clustering and manual review. The results reveal distinct thematic patterns across the political spectrum and media types, with right-leaning news outlets focusing on topics like immigration, while left-leaning emphasized protest and media freedom. Themes generating the most audience engagement, measured by comment-to-view ratios, were most often the most polarizing ones. In contrast, less polarizing themes such as video games and nature showed higher approval, reflected in like-to-view ratios. We also observed a general tendency across all media types to portray political figures in neutral or critical terms rather than favorable ones.

Problem

• Analyzes YouTube's role in political communication during the 2024 French elections.
• Examines thematic differences in discourse across political and media channels.
• Investigates how polarizing themes drive audience engagement versus approval.

Innovation

• Used large language models for theme identification
• Applied clustering and manual review for analysis
• Analyzed over 100,000 video transcripts and metadata