* Lynnette Hui Xian Ng submitted the work on September 3, 2026.
* The study analyzed 67,725 YouTube comments.
* The data focuses on socio-political topics related to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria.
* A unified sentiment-and-emotion pipeline was used for analysis.
* Sentiment across all five country-oriented corpora is overwhelmingly negative.
* Country-level emotion profiles are structurally similar.
* Discourse involves country-level political actors and cross-border historical trauma figures.
* Grief is identified as a distinguishing emotion for Iraq.
* The valence of US-related content correlates with the presence or absence of direct US military engagement.
* The findings concern the emotional register of affective publics in the MENA region.

Arabic YouTube discourse surrounding socio-political issues in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria reveals a unified regional affective public rather than distinct national ones. Analysis of over 67,000 comments shows that sentiment is consistently negative across these geographies, with structurally similar emotional profiles. This suggests a shared emotional register across the MENA region that is shaped by historical layers and geographic conditions.
While the overarching emotional tone is shared, specific variations exist based on lived political experiences. For example, grief is more prominent in Iraqi discourse, and reactions to the United States vary depending on whether there has been direct military engagement in a specific country. This indicates that while the emotional framework is regional, it is conditioned by specific political actors and historical traumas. These dynamics have direct implications for how public diplomacy is conducted within the region.

This scholarship employs a quantitative approach to mapping "affective publics," using a sentiment-and-emotion pipeline to process a substantial dataset. A peer reviewer would likely query the specific parameters of the "unified pipeline"—specifically how it handles Arabic dialects (diglossia) and sarcasm, which are prevalent in YouTube comments and can skew sentiment analysis. The sample size is robust, but the reliance on YouTube comments introduces a selection bias toward users who are more emotionally charged or politically active.
The central claim—that a single regional affective public exists—is well-supported by the structural similarity of the emotion profiles. The authors avoid overclaiming by acknowledging "geographic conditioning," particularly regarding US military intervention. This suggests that emotional registers are not static cultural traits but are responsive to material political realities. This extends existing knowledge by shifting the focus from national identity to shared regional trauma and political experience.
For these findings to matter outside of computational social science, practitioners of public diplomacy must recognize that national-level messaging may be ineffective if the underlying emotional driver is a cross-border regional sentiment.
Bridge Questions:
1. How would the results change if the dataset included platforms with different algorithmic curation, such as X (Twitter) or TikTok?
2. To what extent does the "overwhelmingly negative" sentiment reflect actual public opinion versus the incentive structures of YouTube's engagement algorithms?
3. Would the "single regional public" hold if the study included North African Arabic-speaking countries?