Digital discourse of Indonesian netizens on the US–Israel–Iran war on TikTok: a virtual netnography study

Abstract

This study examines how Indonesian TikTok users interpreted the escalation of the United States–Israel–Iran war in early March 2026. Using a virtual netnography approach guided by an explicit coding framework, it analyzes 20 purposively selected TikTok posts and 853 comments drawn from Indonesian-language news and commentary accounts that circulated intensively during the opening phase of the war. Through open, axial, and selective coding, the study identifies nine recurring discourse themes: information authority crisis, geopolitical polarization, anti-American sentiment, sacralization of war, imperialism critique, justice for Iran, cynicism toward Western leadership, humor and satire, and digital morality. The findings suggest that TikTok comment sections functioned not only as spaces of reaction, but also as sites where users debated credibility, expressed political alignment, and translated a distant war into locally meaningful moral and religious terms. The corpus also contained calls for peace, empathy for civilians, and criticism of sectarian hostility. The study contributes to digital political communication scholarship by showing how a non-Western public interpreted geopolitical war through short-form video and comment interaction, and by demonstrating the value of virtual netnography, including a multimodal coding framework spanning verbal and visual data, for examining affective, moral, and epistemic contestation on TikTok.