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Paper short abstract

This study explores how Egyptian YouTube families navigate visibility, morality, and privacy. Through digital ethnography and computational comment analysis, it shows how everyday scenes ignite moral conflict, polarise audiences, and shape new forms of online intimacy.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Egyptian YouTube creators navigate the embodied and emotional tensions that arise from digital visibility in a polarised media environment. Drawing on digital ethnography and computational analysis of large-scale comment datasets, it traces how domestic scenes, religious gestures, and moments of vulnerability operate as “surfaces of the body” through which audiences negotiate morality, authenticity, and social belonging. These intimate visual fragments, for example an eleven-year-old girl who chooses to wear the hijab, displays it on camera, and later removes it, set off intense audience reactions that turn ordinary content into contested sites of judgment.

The analysis shows how digital infrastructures shape and intensify emotional economies. Conservative viewers treat modesty as a moral requirement. Liberal audiences call for openness and self-expression. Commercial incentives push creators toward disclosure. Familial norms call for privacy. These competing demands create affective divides that split comment publics into moral camps that police bodies, question intentions, and claim religious authority.

By tracing how creators respond through selective concealment, careful self-revelation, and strategic silence, the paper demonstrates how digital imaginaries structure embodied relations and redraw boundaries between inside and outside, authenticity and performance, and intimacy and distance. It argues that attention to these ambivalent digital dynamics is essential for understanding how polarisation becomes material in bodies, gestures, emotions, and algorithmically magnified visibility. At the same time, the study identifies small but meaningful moments of empathy and repair that endure within these contested spaces and offer alternative ways of relating in the midst of moral tension.