About

A permanent observatory of political YouTube and TikTok.

YOUPOL continuously collects, transcribes and annotates the videos of the tracked political channels, and keeps what the platforms remove. An observatory of political YouTube and TikTok, carried by its authors and computed on their own machines.

11
tracked channels
167
transcribed videos
7.5k
classified sentences
0
deleted videos preserved
Why

On 12 March 2025, a channel disappeared

That day, YouTube deleted FDENEWS, a French far-right channel: 1,755 videos, 68.3 million views, 103,000 subscribers in nearly ten years. For anyone who had not planned ahead, everything had ceased to exist.

YOUPOL was tracking the channel: every video was already transcribed, every comment and every piece of metadata recorded. The deletion became a data point. The observatory collects before the platforms remove, because what they remove is what research most needs to study.

Four gaps filled

Existing bases stopped at the metadata

Databases on online political discourse stopped at titles, metadata or comments. YOUPOL is, to our knowledge, the first to combine these four things.

The substance of the videos

Full transcripts, by speaker and by sentence, produced by the project and not by the platforms’ subtitles.

167videos transcribed

The deleted content

Removed videos, closed channels and moderated comments stay in the base, with the date and the reason for the removal.

0vanished videos preserved

Audience trajectories

Views, likes and comments measured at discovery, at day 1, 7 and 30, then every month: influence reads over time.

109Mviews measured on videos online

Comments, over time

Comments are kept with their date, likes and replies, even when deleted later.

340kcomments preserved
How

Three construction choices

01

Transcribe ourselves

The voice is isolated from the music, speakers are told apart without being identified, then speech is transcribed in the language spoken. The result depends neither on the platform’s subtitles nor on their availability.

02

Annotate down to the sentence

An annotation frame where a local language model assists the coding, checked by the team, trains sentence-level classifiers: political or not, nine themes. Their reliability is measured and published.

03

Compute on our machines

The computers of the team and of collaborators, linked by a distributed-computing application, transcribe and analyse the videos. The observatory depends on no institutional cluster and on no platform interface.

For whom

Made to be used

  1. 01

    Citizens

    free, no account

    See what is said this week on political channels, which public figures recur, which arguments circulate and where they come from.

    Open the observatory
  2. 02

    Journalists and teachers

    records, trends, removals

    Find a vanished video and its record, compare orientations on an equal footing, cite a trend with its base and its limits.

    Services
  3. 03

    Researchers

    explorer, API, R and Python clients

    A validated instrument, documented in a methods paper, with access to transcripts, classified sentences and comments on request.

    Request access
The data

Three regimes for the data

Published

Video metadata, counts per sentence and per theme, mentions of public figures, automatic records and syntheses, audiences, removals, the list of channels and their orientation.

Under controlled access

The text of transcripts, speaker turns and comments, with their authors’ pseudonyms, reserved for research projects, by access tier.

What is never published

The name of a private person named in a video (victim, witness, accused): records that contain one are not published. No video is redistributed; the player points to the platform.

Milestones

The project since 2024

  1. Building the corpus — French and Quebec channels chosen and coded by orientation; first transcriptions, the archive going back to the channels’ first videos.
  2. Classifiers and validation — assisted and checked annotation, training of the political and theme classifiers, precision check; paper in the Revue française de science politique.
  3. Collaborative infrastructure — distributed computing on the project’s computers, methods paper, data explorer, API, R and Python clients.
  4. Public observatory — videos of the week, automatic records and syntheses, arguments by theme, vanished videos.
  5. United States — eleven American channels join the corpus; measures compared per video rather than by sentence volume.
Open science

The method is published, so is the code

  1. 01

    The methods paper

    SocArXiv · 2026

    Lemor, A. & Boursier, T. (2026). YouPol: A Collaborative Research Infrastructure and Database for Political Content on YouTube and TikTok.

    PDFdoi:10.31235/osf.io/vpzmq_v2Cite
  2. 02

    The clients

    R · Python · GitHub

    youpoldata (R) and youpol-client (Python) talk to the API with a personal key; their code is public.

    r-youpol-datayoupol-client
  3. 03

    The method, in detail

    eleven steps

    Corpus, collection, processing, themes, reliability, public figures, summaries, arguments, removals, coverage, limits and corrections log.

    Read the method

The team

About the team
Tristan Boursier

Tristan Boursier

Postdoctoral researcher

Sciences Po Paris · Université du Québec en Outaouais

Research design, orientation coding and political analysis.

Antoine Lemor

Antoine Lemor

Postdoctoral researcher

Université de Sherbrooke · CIRST · RFICS

Methods, machine learning, infrastructure and website.

Arnaud Miranda

Arnaud Miranda

Research collaborator

CEVIPOF · Sciences Po Paris

Political theory and analysis of reactionary discourse.

Project paper