A review and assessment of organized political activities on Persian Twitter

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PH.D. in Social Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor in Social Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract
Twitter remains blocked in Iran, while politicians and citizens regularly use the platform to share and exchange comments. There have been remarks and complaints by authorities and the media about the allegedly organized activities on the social media, promoting particular political messages to manipulate the public opinions. This research intends to examine the possibility of existence and the potential impact of such activities by analyzing sentiments and metadata of tweets in which Iranian politicians were mentioned during the period of a month. The findings show that the top most active user accounts show significantly higher negative sentiment for Iranian politicians. Moreover, estimating locations of the most active accounts show significantly different sentiments, where American and Iranian-based users show higher negative sentiments than their European-based counterparts. Finally, all users, regardless of location or frequency of activity, show higher negative sentiment towards the conservative 13th government in comparison with its moderate 12th counterpart.
 
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  • Receive Date 22 August 2024
  • Revise Date 03 November 2024
  • Accept Date 19 January 2025