The 10th International Congress of AE-IC, regarded as one of Spain's leading academic events in communication research, will bring together hundreds of researchers in Pontevedra to discuss the challenges of “communicating in uncertainty” in a context marked by misinformation, polarization, and rapid technological changes.

INPOLITYOUNG's proposal fits within this broader context, offering a focus on youth digital culture and the role of platforms such as YouTube in shaping political narratives and citizenship models among young people.

INPOLITYOUNG will present two key papers. The first, titled “Pedro Sánchez, Fitness, and Pokémon: Spanish YouTubers as Agents of Political Socialization”, will be presented by Merce Oliva, Reinald Besalú, Ona Anglada-Pujol, and Aleix Martí-Danés. This study examines digital conversations on YouTube Spain in 2024, analyzing a dataset of all videos published during that year. The research aims to show how political narratives are integrated into dominant YouTube content, such as gaming, fitness, and lifestyle.

Secondly, Alan Tapscott and Jordi Justicia will present the paper “Unpacking YouTubers’ Discourse: Methodological Challenges in Topic Modeling and Network Analysis”. In this study, the authors propose an innovative approach to analyzing over 59,000 videos from 381 Spanish YouTubers using Big Data, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Artificial Intelligence. By comparing different topic models and performing network analysis, the researchers aim to map the circulation and polarization of politial discourse on YouTube. The process combines automated labeling with qualitative validation to identify emerging interpretative frameworks in the analyzed content. 

Both presentations represent a significant contribution to understanding how young people engage with political discourse on digital platforms and open new avenues for studying political communication in the digital age.