Abstract
It is claimed that the Syrian War is the most socially mediated war in history thus far. This paper explores how the Syrian War is framed and discussed in YouTube, which has become a central stage for reporting and discussing the conflict in a global-transnational setting. The case study focuses on the coverage of the alleged chemical attacks in Khan Sheikhoun on April 2017 in non-mainstream media content published on the platform. The analysis has two purposes: to explore how the conflict is framed by alternative sources and to examine how viewers react to this content. The data yielded with this mixed methods design eventually helps with mapping the discourse in the web.
Indicators “USA” and “UN” were double-checked in the output, and instances that implied the comment did not refer to the country or organization respectively were excluded.
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Notes
- 1.
Agnotology is derived from “agnosis” which is the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance.
- 2.
Video 5: “I think the Obama administration had a great opportunity to solve this crisis.”
- 3.
Video 1: “If Trump is indeed an illuminati puppet, which is the most probable.”
- 4.
Video 4: “The left (democrats) want the ring, they want power”, “commit war crimes”, “you don’t have to leave the borders to make the arrests”
- 5.
Video 4: “New York Times claim that the rebels have used chemical weapons 50 times—madness.”
- 6.
Video 3: “WMD were destroyed,” “Syrian rebel groups have Sarin,” “Why would Assad invite US to Syria to inspect WMD and then use it to launch an attack on civilians?”
- 7.
Video 5: “Right now Assad is winning, he has the upper hand. He has Russia and the US on his side.”
- 8.
Video 3: “The white helmets are not using gloves while carrying the dead and the wounded.”
- 9.
Video 3: CNN Hersh: “The most radical Jihadi has sarin.”
- 10.
Video 5: NBC News, President Trump: “Let’s say you get rid of Assad, who is going to replace him?”.
- 11.
Video 5: BBC, Igor Konoshenkoy (Russian Defence Military Spokesman) “Which produced chemical warfare munitions.”
- 12.
Video 2: CNN, Republican Massey: “It is hard to know what is happening in Syria right now.”
- 13.
Video 4: “Today is the day that we decide if the war ends or goes on forever. Today is the day that we decide whether millions live or die.”
- 14.
Video 1: “If Trump is an illuminati puppet like Bush and Obama.”
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Dekker, I., Nguyen, D. (2020). Combining Qualitative and Digital Methods for Exploratory Framing Analyses: The Case of Alternative Video Coverage of the Syrian War on YouTube. In: Nguyen, D., Dekker, I., Nguyen, S. (eds) Understanding Media and Society in the Age of Digitalisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38577-4_6
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