YouTube Shorts from Major News Outlets on the Israel–Hamas War (October 2023–October 2024)

Dataset Overview The dataset comprises 2,370 publicly accessible YouTube Shorts, disseminated by four prominent international news outlets: Al Jazeera (AJ), BBC News, Deutsche Welle (DW), and TRT World. The collection captures one year of short-form video news coverage related to the Israel–Hamas war and its surrounding geopolitical discourse. It includes videos reporting on military developments, political and diplomatic statements, humanitarian conditions, public reactions, and related international events. It is designed to support computational and reproducible analyses of platform-native news production in short-form video environments. Data Collection and Scope Videos were collected from the official YouTube channels of the four outlets and restricted to content published in the Shorts format. All entries correspond to videos that were publicly accessible at the time of data collection. Each entry of the 2370 YT Shorts was collected via the official YouTube API two weeks after publication. The dataset contains a curated selection of YouTube Shorts featuring content from major news organizations covering war-related events via short-form video during the first year of the conflict. File Description The dataset is provided in CSV format, where each row represents a single video-level entry.For each video, the dataset includes the following fields (where available): video_id: YouTube video identifier title: Original video title upload_date_raw: Timestamp of publication as provided by YouTube month: Year–month of publication (YYYY–MM), derived from the upload date view_count: View count at the time of data collection source_file / outlet: Publishing news outlet (AJ, BBC, DW, or TRT) description: Video description text as provided by the outlet All timestamps are normalized to UTC to facilitate temporal and cross-outlet analyses. The dataset contains metadata only and does not include the video files themselves. Ethics and Availability The dataset consists exclusively of publicly available metadata retrieved from YouTube. It does not contain private user data or comments. View counts and metadata reflect the state of the videos at the time of collection and may change over time. Acknowledgements This work utilized Jetstream2 at Indiana University through allocation HUM200003 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296).