arXiv subjects

Caroline Violot

Publications and source records attributed to Caroline Violot.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

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

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.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

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 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.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Shorts vs. Regular Videos on YouTube: A Comparative Analysis of User Engagement and Content Creation Trends

YouTube introduced the Shorts video format in 2021, allowing users to upload short videos that are prominently displayed on its website and app. Despite having such a large visual footprint, there are no studies to date that have looked at the impact Shorts introduction had on the production and consumption of content on YouTube. This paper presents the first comparative analysis of YouTube Shorts versus regular videos with respect to user engagement (i.e., views, likes, and comments), content creation frequency and video categories. We collected a dataset containing information about 70k channels that posted at least one Short, and we analyzed the metadata of all the videos (9.9M Shorts and 6.9M regular videos) they uploaded between January 2021 and December 2022, spanning a two-year period including the introduction of Shorts. Our longitudinal analysis shows that content creators consistently increased the frequency of Shorts production over this period, especially for newly-created channels, which surpassed that of regular videos. We also observe that Shorts target mostly entertainment categories, while regular videos cover a wide variety of categories. In general, Shorts attract more views and likes per view than regular videos, but attract less comments per view. However, Shorts do not outperform regular videos in the education and political categories as much as they do in other categories. Our study contributes to understanding social media dynamics, to quantifying the spread of short-form content, and to motivating future research on its impact on society.

cs.SI↗