We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content
consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore
new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation.
First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to
dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of
different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on
social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional
insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide
insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a
novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative data
enrichment to generate descriptive and culturally receptive personas
from social media audiences.