Mapping Iranian Twittersphere during the pandemic; an analysis of networks and frames of Covid-19 in authoritarian countries

This paper investigates the networks and mechanisms of political communication in Iranian Twittersphere (Persian Twitter) during the first wave of the pandemic. Despite the fact that the existing literature have intensively studied social media activism in non-democratic societies, social media research has yet to grasp the full account of the ways that social media activism shapes and develops in authoritarian regimes. To date, most studies have focused on political unrests and happenings in restrictive contexts. Therefore, we do not know much about the ways that people mobilize and negotiate health crises such as the global pandemic of Covid-19 in Twitter communities. Are users’ networks and discursive activism in health crises similar to their practices during political incidents? Do Twitter users focus on political demands or prefer to discuss the health and humanitarian issues in crises? Do they challenge the hegemonic discourses in non-democratic societies while they are discussing the pandemic? if yes how? Health crises have political dimensions and implications. Nonetheless, they are different from political happenings in origin, nature and essence to a great extent. Thus, this research could extend our understanding of social media activism in authoritarian regimes by focusing on an understudied context, i.e. Iran, during a merely different incident, Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing upon the literature into social media activism, this investigation focuses on a dataset of 4,165,177 Persian tweets having been collected during the first months of Cov-19 crisis, form 21 January, 2020 to 29 April, 2020. First, we will use Social Network Analysis to detect different communities in Persian Twitter. Then, we will identify the most influential users in each community based on their PageRank centrality (Easley & Kleinberg, 2010). Next, we will extract the list of top 50 users in each community. In the next step, we will extract all of the top users’ tweets. Following KhosraviNik (2017) approach to Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS), we will then discursively and thematically code the tweets to identify 1) which political group each cluster was close to, 2) the salient themes and grounded frames in each cluster, 3) the extent to which these themes supported/challenged the dominant discourses in Iran. The number of coded tweets will be chosen based on the saturation principle. This paper will shed more light on the process and nuances of social media activism in authoritarian regimes, beyond political upheavals. To date, we collected the data and conducted the community detection. The next steps, including human-driven discursive coding, will be finished in late June. Then, we will finalize the paper and write the findings and discussion section, in which the findings will be compared to the exsiting literature into social media activism in non-democratic countries. As a result, the whole work, with final and concrete results, will be ready by August 1st. It will comply with the timeline of the conference.