The corpus
Three countries, seven orientations, the channels chosen and coded by the team.
The channels and their orientations
YOUPOL tracks 89 YouTube and TikTok channels (France), mostly French-language, chosen for their audience and their place in online political debate.
Channels were selected iteratively: an initial list based on audience figures, previous research and media monitoring, extended by snowball sampling from YouTube’s recommendations. Each of the three TikTok accounts continues a YouTube channel in the corpus. The videos of two channels closed since their selection remain in the corpus and count in the trends.
The English-language channels (two manosphere channels added on 2 October 2026, then eleven American channels added on 4 October 2026) do not go through the classifiers, which are trained on French: their sentences count neither in the shares of political sentences nor in the theme shares. Their videos are transcribed in the spoken language, summarised in French and English, and the public figures they name are counted like the others.
The far right is deliberately over-represented in the corpus, to allow a fine-grained analysis of its discourse. Each channel receives an orientation. This research category is assigned by the team from the channel’s content and may differ from how the channel presents itself. A channel keeps its orientation for all its videos.
- Far right
- Channels that promote an ethno-nationalist, anti-immigration or authoritarian discourse.
- Conservative right
- Channels of the American conservative right, institutional or media-based, distinct from the far right.
- Left
- Channels with progressive positions, included for comparison.
- Manosphere
- Channels that promote anti-feminist or “red pill” ideologies.
- Conspiracism
- Channels centred on conspiracy narratives, which often overlap with far-right discourse.
- Libertarianism
- Channels that defend individual freedom, economic freedom in particular, against the state.
- Culture
- History, culture or entertainment channels that address political questions.