To try to convince the French of the merits of the pension reform, the government will hardly be able to count on Facebook. In a few weeks, opponents of the reform – La France Insoumise and Rassemblement National in the lead – have literally gone ahead of the debate on the platform, according to figures collected by Tech&Co thanks to the Crowdtangle statistics tool, owned by Facebook.
Tech&Co analyzed all Facebook videos containing the terms “retirement” or “retirements” posted during the month of January 2023, to isolate those posted by political accounts. Of the fifty most popular sequences, all have been posted by either Nupes (32) or RN (18) elected officials.
LFI and RN: almost a grand slam
At the National Rally, the success is mainly based on videos posted online by the accounts of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Their sequences that evoke the theme accumulate, among them, more than 2.7 million views in the month of January. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, one of Facebook’s political stars, manages to exceed one million videos viewed on the subject.
Regarding the opposition to the pension reform, Marine Le Pen is at the origin of the most viewed video of January: posted online on January 10, it accumulates nearly 800,000 views. It shows a speech by Marine Le Pen in the National Assembly, questioning Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
On the left, Ruffin dethrones Mélenchon
On the left, only one video has not been published by an elected representative of rebel France. It is a sequence shared by the socialist Boris Vallaud, which has accumulated some 220,000 views to date.
The success is based, among other things, on the account of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but above all on a swarm of deputies who massively share videos on the subject. Among them: Clémentine Autain, Antoine Léaument, Clémence Guette, Louis Boyard and Alma Dufour.
But it is above all the deputy -still LFI- François Ruffin who wins the day, with more than 2 million videos viewed related to the pension reform in January. Almost three times more than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a record in the French political class on this issue.
François Ruffin is also the author of two of the five most popular sequences. The first of them, published on January 11, has 740,000 views. Entitled “It is Macron’s hidden program”, it shows an intervention by the elected LFI in the National Assembly.
The second sequence (370,000 visits) shows the deputy sharing the day of Serge, 61, a newspaper vendor and former forklift driver. It comes after a sequence by Jordan Bardella (490,000 views), published on January 24, made up of excerpts from a pension debate between the RN-elect and Gérald Darmanin during the 2022 presidential campaign.
An advance for the deputy of the Somme
Also thanks to Crowdtangle, Tech&Co has analyzed the evolution of the most popular political accounts in terms of pensions since September, integrating on this occasion all the videos published.
Once again, François Ruffin made impressive progress with almost 5 million videos viewed in January. A success driven by the fight against the pension reform, which therefore represents around 40% of its audience. Behind him, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan can count on his other recurring themes, including criticism of aid to Ukraine or the vaccination issue, to reach 4 million videos viewed.
Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella have just surpassed 2 million videos viewed on Facebook in January 2023, with a share of videos related to pension reform that in both cases exceeded 50%. The proportion is even higher on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which is why videos on the subject of retirement account for 75% of the audience.
Despite these numerical successes, nothing says that the different political figures are not reaping the fruits of this popularity at the polls. During the 2022 presidential election, Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan were among the most influential political figures on the platform, but they only received 7% to 2% of the vote.
Source: BFM TV
