Field Notes: Iranian Gen Z on YouTube

The question.

Our research in 2025 sought to establish how trust is built among creators and young people on YouTube, studied through Gen Z Iranians facing information and access constraints.

Why this matters beyond Iran.

The places where traditional media concepts are most broken are where you can see most clearly what people actually seek out in information, both functionally and emotionally.

When the old models fail, people create their own. Information exchanges emerge organically. New patterns form. New systems take shape.

Under constraint, more adaptive media strategies emerge. They do not come from derivatives of “best practices” in established newsrooms operating in less constrained contexts. Some of the clearest lessons come from the hardest places, where disruption and distortion are constant.

Iran is one of those places. People route around a media system that largely serves an oppressive state and does not deliver. If you look at where people actually converse, you get a less obstructed view of how information systems work beyond systemic distortions, and how they adapt.

The information services that emerge in these new spaces also point to opportunities for good media ventures, and for the craft of journalism. We will miss them when we define our possibility space by the current or past formats of established media systems.

Traditional media < the creator space.

The creator space has been disruptive in part because it grew outside the industry, where old structures could not reach, or did not bother to.

In the US and Europe, legacy media thinking often stays focused on preserving institutions as they are. That makes it harder to see what could work differently, and what could be good outside those institutional forms.

Exile media often fall into the same trap. Sometimes that is because they need to appeal to donors who, with the best intentions, still think within familiar formats and mediums instead of focusing on actual utility for people.

Imaginary nostalgia can only go so far. The best way to preserve, or build, good institutions that actually work for people is not to replicate and defend legacy models that were not working. It is to look at how people actually navigate their reality.

Questions to consider.

• How do we shift from preserving institutions to preserving utility for people who have already moved on?
• In a creator-first world, how does the role of a journalist change from being a gatekeeper to a relational guide?
• If we stop trying to reach "everyone" and focus on constraint-based segments, what specific barriers are currently being ignored?

Free subscribers can download our full report here.