Islamic Soft Power in a Contested World Cup: YouTube Media Framing and Audience Responses to Qatar 2022

Western media widely framed Qatar 2022 as the “most controversial World Cup in history”, with debate centering on migrant labor abuses, human rights violations, and LGBTQ+ discrimination rather than religion or culture. This article examines how YouTube videos and their comment sections reproduce, contest, or reconfigure these frames. It situates patterns of reputational contestation alongside post-tournament tourism and macroeconomic indicators as contextual triangulation rather than causal effects. The study adopts a multi-method media-analytics design. It combines dictionary-based text mining of video transcripts with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling of comments, and interprets these findings alongside tourism statistics, macroeconomic indicators, and relevant survey data. Results show that institutional news and documentary channels with predominantly critical stances consistently foreground labor exploitation and human-rights concerns. By contrast, faith-based advocacy creators and some Qatar-based international programming more frequently mobilize counter-frames emphasizing Western double standards, Islamic values, and digital da‘wah. Hybrid cases demonstrate that critique and defense can coexist within the same platform ecology. Audience responses selectively amplify, contest, or hybridize these framings in the comment sections. Despite persistent negative perceptions in parts of Western Europe, contextual indicators show that Qatar 2022 coincided with record tourist arrivals and growth in non-energy sectors. This pattern underscores that contested digital framings do not straightforwardly map onto macro-level economic performance.