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This study analyzes 67,725 YouTube comments related to socio-political topics in five Arabic countries, revealing a unified emotional register among users rather than distinct national sentiments. The findings indicate that sentiment is predominantly negative across all countries, with structural similarities in emotion profiles, while also highlighting specific regional variations, particularly the unique grief associated with Iraq. The research illustrates how emotional expressions on Arabic YouTube are influenced by historical and political contexts, particularly in relation to US military involvement, suggesting significant implications for public diplomacy in the MENA region.
A shared emotional landscape on Arabic YouTube reveals that sentiment is predominantly negative, shaped by historical trauma and political contexts rather than national identities.
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.
