MediaFutures Work Package 1 and The Network for culture, inequality and democracy (KUD/CID) at Infomedia invite to a public lecture on the topic of alternative political analysis on YouTube, given by Quentin Gilliotte, Professeur Junior at Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris, France) There will be time for a Q&A.    

The productions on digital platforms are becoming an increasingly significant source of information. Within this context, a large number of actors on digital platforms offer analyses and commentary on political current events. Within the Francophone space, we find video creators such as HugoDécrypte, Tatiana Ventôse, Usul, and Gaspard G. These actors place themselves in opposition to traditional media (television, radio) : they advocate for an “alternative” way of handling information, whether in terms of the audience they target, the topics they cover, or the formats they use. How do these different actors address political current events? Considering both economic models and political positions, what topics are mobilized?

The communication will proceed in two stages. Firstly, I will present the method for constructing the corpus of selected channels through data extraction from the YouTube API, utilizing network analysis tools. Secondly, I will present a mapping of the topics addressed by these different video creators based on the automated textual analysis of a corpus of 8740 transcribed videos (representing all videos published by the selected actors between January and July 2023) using a topic modeling method (Latent Dirichlet Allocation).