From cricket diplomacy to digital fronts: YouTube comments and securitization of India-Pakistan rivalry

This article investigates how digital audiences on YouTube amplify security rhetoric around the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry. Analyzing 20 sports-political videos and 54,520 comments from the 2025 Cricket Asia Cup, we measure the escalation of threat-based language from video creators to their audiences. Using bilingual lexicon, sentiment analysis, and qualitative readings, we find a significant “amplification gap”: comment sections contained five to six times more securitizing language than the original videos. This platformed securitization is driven by negative emotions, the mobilization of vernacular cultural symbols like boycott and martyrdom, and algorithmic bias. Our findings necessitate a theoretical update to securitization, moving it beyond an elite-driven model to account for distributed, algorithmically amplified threat production by everyday users. Drawing on the Copenhagen School and the field of vernacular security studies, we argue that YouTube comments function as primary arenas where vernacular voices intensify geopolitical tensions, posing a significant challenge to diplomatic normalization.