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

TL;DR

This study analyzes YouTube's role in shaping political discourse during the 2024 French elections, revealing thematic patterns, polarization, and media portrayals across different political and media groups.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-automated method combining large language models with clustering to analyze political themes on YouTube during elections.

Findings

Right-leaning outlets focus on immigration topics.

Polarizing themes generate most audience engagement.

Media portrayals tend to be neutral or critical rather than favorable.

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.