Date of Award
Spring 5-18-2024
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Advisor(s)
Kari Evanson
Second Advisor
Kate Wilson, Ph.D.
Abstract
How are French youth communicating online with themselves and how are they interacting with the information they consume? This study considers the question by examining YouTube comments from the comment sections of two interviews done on presidential candidates during the 2022 presidential election by 26-year-old influencer, Hugo Decrypte. These comments were compared with comments from interviews done by traditional TV news sources on the same candidates (BFMTV, a privately owned broadcaster, and Touche pas à mon poste!, an originally public broadcast hosted by a Gen-X TV personality). The comments were scraped using Octoparse web data extraction software and then sorted by ‘likes’. Based on their rankings, a close reading was done of the top five to ten comments and these comments were further compared to public polling and survey data on political motivation and ideology. The findings show that despite increasing polarization in the online space, French youth actively seek neutral information about and on both sides of the political spectrum. French youth also primarily connect over ideological similarities instead of connecting under political parties. French youth online use comment sections as places to share, collaborate, and connect over their political beliefs and share their opinions freely.
Recommended Citation
Howe, Nicholas H., "À la comment du peuple — How youth communicated, connected, and collaborated online around the French presidential election of 2022" (2024). Senior Theses. 148.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/international_senior/148
