Document Type : Research Article
Authors
1
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
2
PhD Student, Sociology of Development, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Introduction: In this research, through identifying the components of what is called “Iranian Twitter”, we tried to identify and evaluate the patterns Iranian Twitter users are affected by the political attitudes of the Iranian Twitter Influencers.
Method: In this study we decided to analyze the data on the communication networks between users and Influencers. The steps we took to answer the three questions of research were as follows: We identified the Iranian Twitter Influencers using snowball sampling. Then, by reviewing the pages of the influencers one by one, we recorded their characteristics in our list. Then, we collected the information about the communication network between the influencers, and used that as input for Gephi software. Finally, we calculated each group of users attributed to each political attitude, how much expose themselves to influencers with different political attitudes, on average.
Results and discussion: two-fifths of Principality users are considered to be fanatic users. A fanatic user is a person who follows more than 70% of the influencers and has the same political attitude. In fact, the fanatic user is one who is often exposed to one type of political attitude and is less inclined to be exposed to different opinions. Only 1% of transformationalist users were fanatic users. On average, 56% of the influencers followed by a reformist user with reformist attitudes. Also, transformationalist users are more likely to follow non-political influencers (44%) than to follow transformationalist influencers (33%). The complete isolation of separatists is evident in this table, as they have no share in the influencers followed by reformist, transformationalist, and principalist users, and only 1% of the them are followed by subversives supported the separation of Iran. Further, 64% of influencers are also followed by principalist users tended to be principalist.
Conclusion: The results showed that although none of the political attitudes in Iranian Twitter have significant superiority to others, a significant proportion of users who favored a political attitude, displayed little tendency to be exposed to different political messages. Another important point is that online social networks should not necessarily be seen as a tool for organizing movements or revolutions. Influencers of online social networks affect attitudes of ordinary users by the contents that they publish constantly in long term. The continuous and daily influence of these new media in shaping the lifestyle, habits and attitudes of users is also important. If we do not understand the important role the online social networks could play in daily lives of users, we could not understand how they influence in political contexts.
Keywords
)