A Critical Stylistic Study of Cyber Trolls’ Comments on the Al-Jazeera Arabic TV Channel’s YouTube Videos Concerning the Israeli-Iranian 2024 Conflict

This study develops a critical stylistic model to identify and analyze trolling comments on social media platforms. It attempts to identify the trolling messages and the political agendas behind them in a selected genre. Namely, it will examine and analyze the comments on a YouTube video published on April 13, 2024, by Al-Jazeera’s Arabic Channel YouTube Platform concerning the Iranian military attack against Israel. Those who wrote those trolling comments showed their dissatisfaction with the limited and planned attack by Iran, which did not cause too many Israeli people to be killed during that attack. In fact, they wanted that attack to be the starting point of a more destructive regional war. Their inflammatory comments underline racist doctrine and nationalist ideologies through their hate-filled lexical items against the channel, its correspondent, and the pro-Iranian participants approving that kind and level of Iranian response. The current study adopts a two-dimensional model for uncovering the ideological convictions of the trolls and their trolling messages. It relies on the findings of social, psychological, and critical stylistic perspectives as it attempts to test the workability of the model in this new genre and the possibility of universality of its suggested analytic critical stylistic tools by applying the model to Arabic data. The study concluded that cyber trolls often wait until a considerable number of the targeted opponents comment, and then they start commenting using different techniques. The trolls’ comments reflected their racist, religious doctrine and nationalist political ideologies.