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

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 & 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 overrepresented. 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.

The paper provides a timely snapshot of the French digital political landscape, effectively utilizing graph theory to map the polarization between political clusters (e.g., the far-right 'Rassemblement National' versus the left-wing 'Nouveau Front Populaire'). However, the study relies heavily on YouTube's public API and recommendation links, which act as a proxy for visibility rather than actual viewership data. It assumes that recommendation graphs equate to user journeys, which may overstate the 'rabbit hole' effect without proprietary watch-log data. Furthermore, the analysis is limited to a specific electoral window, potentially missing long-term algorithmic shifts or the impact of 'Shorts,' which have different recommendation logic than long-form videos.