The corpus
Three countries, seven orientations, the channels chosen and coded by the team.
- 1Three countries: France, Quebec and the United States, on YouTube and TikTok.
- 2Each channel is chosen and coded by the team: a country, an orientation, a language.
- 3Seven orientations; the far right is deliberately over-represented.
- 4The English-language corpus was extended in October 2026; its classifiers will soon be trained.
The channels and their orientations
YOUPOL tracks 126 YouTube and TikTok channels (France, Quebec and the United States), 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 three channels closed since their selection remain in the corpus and count in the trends.
The English-language corpus was extended recently: two manosphere channels added on 2 October 2026, then eleven American channels added on 4 October 2026. The classifiers in service are trained on French; their English counterparts will soon be trained and deployed. Until then, the sentences of these channels 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.