YouTube Discourse During the Iran Conflict and the Afghanistan Withdrawal

Abstract

War discourse on YouTube emerges through linked interactions among videos, channels, audiences, comments, and replies. This paper compares YouTube discussions of two U.S.-linked conflicts: the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 and the Iran conflict escalation in 2026. We analyze four corpora separating news organizations from political influencers, comprising 340,383 comments from 212,968 unique commenters. Our framework combines channel-level discourse embeddings adapted from WEAT-style semantic association tests, and classifier-based toxicity and hate-related proxy scores. The results show that Afghanistan and Iran discussions form distinct discourse spaces, while some ideologically different actors converge toward similar patterns of conflict commentary. Semantic associations around geopolitical terms vary across conflicts and source types, indicating that the same vocabulary is framed differently across communities. Hostility analysis further shows that influencer-centered spaces tend to attract more toxic discussion, while the Iran corpus exhibits stronger and more persistent hate-related signals, including in replies.