Abstract This paper introduces a conceptual framework for analyzing social media narratives as socio-technologically situated, multi-authored, and interactionally co-constructed phenomena. While narrative analyses of platforms like YouTube often isolate videos as self-contained stories, we argue that narratives on social media unfold across dynamic webs of interaction involving creators, commenters, viewers, and platform affordances and algorithms. Our framework expands what counts as a narrative on social media by tracing how stories are edited, framed, responded to, and algorithmically shaped across time. Focusing on a YouTube video of an Uber ride posted by a Turkish social media influencer in the US, we demonstrate how multiple co-tellers introduce new interpretations of the recorded events and reshape the narrative for subsequent viewers. By identifying co-tellers and tracing the trajectories of narratives, this framework allows analysts to better examine how narratives, thus discourses and ideologies, evolve, circulate, and impact audiences.
Özçelik et al. (Fri,) studied this question.