In Times of Crisis: An Exploratory Study of Media and Political Discourse on YouTube During the 2024 French Elections
Vera Sosnovik, Caroline Violot, Mathias Humbert
TL;DR
This paper investigates how YouTube served as a arena for political discourse during the 2024 European Parliament and French legislative elections in France. It combines a semi-automated theme extraction pipeline—leveraging a large language model for topic labeling and clustering with manual refinement—with a multi-source dataset spanning national and local news channels and political actors, collected from 1 March 2023 to 15 July 2024. The study reveals distinct thematic patterns by media type and political orientation, shows that polarizing topics generate higher engagement, and demonstrates a general tendency toward neutral or critical portrayals of political figures. The approach provides a data-driven, domain-specific framework for analyzing platform-based political communication with potential implications for understanding media framing and audience reception on social media during electoral crises.
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.