Affective publics in Arabic YouTube

Abstract

What is the emotional register of Arabic YouTube's affective publics? To investigate this, we analyzed 67,725 YouTube comments collected around socio-political topics associated with Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria using a unified sentiment-and-emotion pipeline. Our results profile a single regional affective public rather than five separate national ones. Sentiment is overwhelmingly negative across all five country-oriented corpora, and the country-level emotion profiles are structurally similar. This shared register still accommodates some regional variations: discourse is organized around country-level political actors and cross-border historical trauma figures, and grief singularizes Iraq from the other countries. The differences in emotional register also tracks lived political causes rather than fixed categories, which we observe from patterns of the valence of US-related content, that tracks the presence or absence of direct US military engagement. Our work shows that the emotional register of Arabic YouTube's affective publics is a shared one that is historically layered and geographically conditioned, which has implications for public diplomacy in the MENA region.