Arabic YouTube Videos on Sleeve Gastrectomy: A Reproducible Web Scrapping Study

Background: Patients’ awareness, attitude, and expectations play a vital role in bariatric surgical practice. Social media platforms, such as YouTube, have emerged as promising tools for providing patient education and support. Our aim was to assess the nature, informative value, and parameters of viewer interactions of videos available on the open video-sharing platform YouTube.Patients and Methods: A comprehensive automatic search of YouTube videos on sleeve gastrectomy was conducted via the Google Drive extension (Apps Script) and YouTube API (V3) using Arabic keywords. Retrieved videos were manually reviewed, and search results irrelevant to sleeve gastrectomy were excluded.Results: Our search yielded 354 YouTube videos related to sleeve gastrectomy. Most videos were released in 2021 (55.9%) and published by personal healthcare professional channels (62.7%). The majority were released in Egypt (68.9%), and the voice commentary was in Arabic (75.1%). The videos were mostly directed towards the general public (84.4%), were informative in nature (80.5%) rather than promotional and discussed surgical details (44.4%) rather than others. YouTube content is mainly informative, focusing on surgical details rather than indications or outcomes.Conclusion: To enhance public awareness, we recommend creating videos covering indications, outcomes, and perioperative guidance, with standardized medical terminology and scientific references.