Politeness Strategies in YouTube Comments on PragerU’s Video : ‘Israelis or Palestinians – Who’s More Tolerant?’

Abstract

This study investigates politeness strategies in user-generated comments on the YouTube video “Israelis or Palestinians – Who Is More Tolerant?” by PragerU, situated within the polarized debate on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory and Herring’s Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA), the research employs a qualitative descriptive approach to examine 100 purposively sampled comments. The analysis identifies the patterned use of four politeness strategies: bald-on-record, positive, negative, and off-record. Findings reveal that highly engaged participants predominantly relied on positive politeness—particularly solidarity-building and appeals to shared values—while less engaged participants tended toward negative politeness, mitigating disagreement through indirectness. Bald-on-record strategies marked categorical ideological assertions, whereas off-record strategies, such as sarcasm and irony, allowed users to critique implicitly without direct confrontation. Unlike prior studies that conceptualize politeness merely as face management, this article demonstrates that in digital political discourse, politeness strategies are deeply ideological and function as markers of self-identification within polarized communities. The novelty of this research lies in its integration of pragmatics and digital discourse analysis to highlight how politeness in online debates not only negotiates interpersonal relations but also indexes ideological stance and group alignment. These findings underscore the significance of digital pragmatics in examining the intersection of language, ideology, and social relations in computer-mediated contexts, with implications for media literacy education to foster respectful and constructive engagement in polarized digital environments.