Digital cultivation of violence: a mixed-methods analysis of content and sentiment in YouTube comments on popular Turkish TV series

This study examines the contemporary manifestations of George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory within the Turkish media landscape by analyzing the relationship between televised representations of violence and digital audience reception. Adopting a mixed-methods research design, the study first conducts a structured qualitative content analysis of 15 selected episodes from three popular Turkish TV series (Camdaki Kız, Sadakatsiz, and Son Yaz) to categorize and quantify various forms of violence. Subsequently, a large-scale computational emotion analysis is performed on 74,478 YouTube comments associated with these episodes using two transformer-based Turkish language models (KUBI and TREMO). The content analysis findings reveal a high prevalence of emotional and psychological violence (61.3%) across all series, followed by physical violence (29.9%), suggesting that mediated harm is increasingly represented through relational and verbal conflict. The computational analysis suggests that these narrative patterns are associated with a high-arousal and largely negative emotional environment in audience discourse, especially around anger and sadness. Notably, while traditional cultivation research emphasizes fear as a primary outcome (Mean World Syndrome), this study finds that digital reception is characterized more by outward-facing anger and moral disgust than by internalized apprehension. The results are consistent with the interpretation that the “seeds” of television cultivation continue to circulate within networked media ecologies, where televised conflict is publicly interpreted and emotionally negotiated through collective digital interaction. By bridging the gap between screen reality and platformed discourse, the research provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the long-term affective impact of Turkish television narratives in the digital age.