Incivility, Domination, and Resistance: Investigating Hate Speech and Incivility on Persian Twitter During the #MahsaAmini Movement

This study investigates how and to which aims and extent Iranian users employ and discursively articulate uncivil language during the Women, Life, freedom movement on Persian Twitter. Women, Life, Freedom is a large political upheaval against the totality of the Iranian regime triggered by the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian girl murdered by the so-called ‘morality police on September 16, 2022. Despite the substantial line of inquiry into hate speech and incivility, our understanding of the ways different users’ communities employ them during anti-regime protests in non-democratic societies is still niche. To address this gap, our empirical analysis focuses on a dataset of 36,255 popular Persian tweets published by 4,807 users during the first months of the movement. We qualitatively and discursively analyzed both users and tweets. Findings reveal that the pro-regime radical community was the most uncivil group. Pro-regime users sarcastically and metaphorically shared uncivil tweets to dominate the network and establish their power. On the other hand, anti-regime users employ incivility as an act of resistance to some extent. In addition, the attacks did not target users’ characteristics such as gender and ethnicity. The main driver for uncivil attacks was the opponent’s political beliefs. Findings also reveal that insulting messages were more dominant in anti-regime groups, while pejorative messages were the main strategy for pro-regime users to discredit their opponents. Death threats were minor in all camps. The rhetorical articulation of different forms of incivility in different political communities is also discussed. This research contributes to our understanding of how different political communities on Twitter employ various forms of incivility and the rhetorical practices through which they articulate uncivil tweets.