Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

Abstract

This chapter explores the link between language, social media, and affective politics through the case study of a YouTube commercial by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain. The video, which exhorts Muslims to reject Islamic terrorism and embrace a moderate version of Islam through a hybrid, emotional mixture of language, music, and images of victims of terrorism, generated a large response among Arab and international audiences, who aligned with its progressive message. Drawing on the notion of “synchronization” (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005), I argue that the commercial constitutes an example of soft affective politics, which reinforces dominant discourses about radical, ‘moderate’ Islam, and about the conflicts in the Arab world by capitalizing on the indexicality of multimodal communication and on the ranking algorithm of the YouTube comments section. I suggest the term algorithmic synchronization to explain the way in which, by displaying more recent and more popular comments on top, the YouTube algorithm erases the historical complexity surrounding discourses of religion, terrorism, and conflict in the Middle East. The study shows how the algorithms of the comments section yield more visibility to the comments aligning with the commercial, thus creating a discursive interpretive nudge and manipulating the discursive power of the representation. The analysis of algorithmic synchronization underlying soft affective discourse is in line with proposals around the need for “Techno-Discursive” approaches which situate a “micro” analysis of linguistic dynamics within the “macro” power-discursive environment (KhosraviNik 2017b, 2018).