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

TL;DR

This study analyzes YouTube political communication during the 2024 French elections, revealing engagement patterns, community structures, and the influence of politicians' appearances on viewer interactions across political groups.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive network analysis of YouTube political content and comments during a major election, highlighting the role of political orientation and media appearances in shaping engagement.

Findings

Far-right and left-wing channels received higher engagement.

Commenting communities were denser and more clustered.

Politicians' appearances increased cross-community commenting activity.

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.