Observatory

YOUPOL / Explore

Themes and arguments.

The arguments put forward or contested in the videos, grouped by theme and by period. Our local model draws them from a sample of political sentences, then they are checked against the sentences; each quote links back to its video.

The theme

Progress

Political sentences about progress in a broad sense: technical, human or social progress.

Reliability of the classifier 0.89F1 0.62checked precision The method
Period

The last seven days are read again every day. * provisional: part of the period’s videos are still to be transcribed. Greyed out: reading pending.

4
political sentences on the theme
2
sentences read
52%
of the period’s YouTube videos transcribed
Gemma 4 31B
read on 5 October 2026
The theme in a typical video
  1. Conservative right 0.0% 1 videos

Mean share, per video, of the political sentences on the theme; each video counts once, from 20 political sentences.

Where the theme’s sentences come from
  1. Conservative right 100% 4 sentences

This split follows the size of each orientation’s corpus: it describes the channel selection, not the weight each side gives the theme.

Arguments come from a sample shared by the territories. Only excerpts from channels in the selected country and their associated arguments are kept here; counts are recalculated.

The periods

The theme, year by year.

Political sentences on the theme by period; click a period to show it. The number also depends on the share of videos transcribed, which varies a lot from year to year.

How the arguments are drawn

The theme’s political sentences are drawn at random by period, with quotas per orientation and a cap per channel and per video. Our local model reads the sentences without knowing their channel or orientation, groups those making the same argument, separates those reporting it in order to contest it and sets aside those off the theme. Orientation shares and quotes come from the sentences, never from the model. The last seven days are read again every day.

The detail in the method
Project paper