Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Zahra Zakeri Nasrabadi ¹
• Azimeh sadat Abdelahi ²
• Mohammad Taghizadeh ³

¹ Assistant Professor, Social sciences department, Payam-e Noor University, Tehran, Iran.

² Assistant Professor, Social Sciences department,, Payam-e Noor University, Tehran. Iran

³ Master of journalism, Payam-e Noor University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The media actions of users in social networks play a significant role in representing social phenomena and constructing social issues at the level of society. The purpose of this research is to examine how the Corona epidemic is represented by the users of the Persian Twitter social network. The research method is a qualitative thematic analysis. The population under study is the most liked tweets related to the topic of Corona in the period February 2020 to February 2021, which were extracted from the social network monitoring system using a purposive sampling method. The three-stage coding of the selected tweets revealed 120 basic themes, 14 organizing themes and 3 global themes: "political dimension: representation of the gap between people and government", "social dimension: transformation of social living" and "cultural dimension: from representation of value conflicts to representation of Iranian Xolqiyat". These themes reflect the users' interpretation of the Corona epidemic in the context of the social, political and cultural conditions of the society. They also show that the Corona epidemic is not only a medical issue, but also a multi-layered social phenomenon that is constructed by users in three main dimensions: political, social and cultural. A large part of the tweets are devoted to criticizing users about the management and policy-making in controlling and dealing with Corona, or sharing experiences and emotions resulting from confronting Corona, sharing tweets containing the necessity of changing social life in accordance with Corona conditions and making fun of Corona conditions.

Keywords

• social network Twitter
• Corona epidemic
• multi-layered social phenomenon
• thematic analysis
• most liked tweets

Main Subjects

• Crisis Communications