The enemy narrative
How authoritarian regimes use Twitter to oppress public opinion, evidence from Flight PS752
Keywords:
strategic narratives, political narrative, social media, civic engagement, online political participation, Twitter, IranAbstract
This research explores the Iranian state strategic narrative through Twitter after the flight 752 incident. 13517 tweets were scraped using the R program, 14 days after the incident. After refining the tweet pool, 4947 tweets were used to identify the state narratives. Thematic analysis and narrative analysis are integrated to obtain a multidimensional understanding. Four narratives are identified, the enemy narrative, the intimidation narrative, the threat narrative, and the fake news narrative. Narratives’ functions and structures are also discussed to present a better understanding of these state strategic narratives and how internet and social media is used against civil society.
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Amnesty International. (2019). Fragmented and unequal: A justice system that fails survivors of intimate partner violence in Louisiana, USA(Report No. AMR 51/1160/2019).
Andrews, M. (2004). Opening to the original contributions. Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense, 1-6.
Arnaudo, D. (2017). Computational Propaganda in Brazil: Social Bots during Elections. Working paper, Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda.
Boshmaf, Y., Muslukhov, I., Beznosov, K., & Ripeanu, M. (2011, December). The socialbot network: when bots socialize for fame and money. In Proceedings of the 27th annual computer security applications conference (pp. 93-102). ACM.
Burns, A., & Eltham, B. (2009). Twitter free Iran: An evaluation of Twitter's role in public diplomacy and information operations in Iran's 2009 election crisis.
Cunningham, D., Everton, S. F., & Schroeder, R. (2015). Social media and the ISIS narrative. Accessed June, 11, 2017.
Frandsen, S. (Ed.), Kuhn, T. (Ed.), Wolff Lundholt, M. (Ed.). (2017). Counter-Narratives and Organization. New York: Routledge.
Ferrara, E. 2017. Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election. CoRR abs/1707.00086.
Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2016). The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), 96-104.
Fisher, W. R. (1985). The narrative paradigm: An elaboration. Communications Monographs, 52(4), 347-367.
Floersch, J., Longhofer, J. L., Kranke, D., & Townsend, L. (2010). Integrating thematic, grounded theory and narrative analysis: A case study of adolescent psychotropic treatment. Qualitative Social Work, 9(3), 407-425.
Howard, P. N., & Kollanyi, B. (2016). Bots,# StrongerIn, and# Brexit: computational propaganda during the UK-EU referendum. Available at SSRN 2798311.
Hoskins, A., & O'Loughlin, B. (2015). Arrested war: The third phase of mediatization. Information, Communication & Society, 18(11), 1320-1338.
International Federation for Human Rights (2020). ORWELLIAN STATE: ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN’S STATE MEDIA AS A WEAPON OF MASS SUPPRESSION, https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/iran749aweb.pdf
Jones, M. O. (2019). The gulf information war| propaganda, fake news, and fake trends: The weaponization of twitter bots in the gulf crisis. International journal of communication, 13, 27.
Khaldarova, I., & Pantti, M. (2016). Fake news: The narrative battle over the Ukrainian conflict. Journalism practice, 10(7), 891-901.
Kollanyi, B., Howard, P. N., & Woolley, S. C. (2016). Bots and automation over Twitter during the first US presidential debate. Comprop data memo, 1, 1-4.
Krippendorff, K. (2011). Computing Krippendorff's alpha-reliability.Miskimmon, A., O'loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2014). Strategic narratives: Communication power and the new world order. Routledge.
Krippendorff, K. (2004). Reliability in content analysis: Some common misconceptions and recommendations. Human communication research, 30(3), 411-433.
Papacharissi Z (2015) Affective Publics: Sentiment, technology and politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pomerantsev, P., & Weiss, M. (2014). The menace of unreality: How the Kremlin weaponizes information, culture and money. The Interpreter, 22. (Nov 22, 2014).
Sadler, N. (2018). Narrative and interpretation on Twitter: Reading tweets by telling stories. New Media & Society, 20(9), 3266-3282.
Shahbaz, A., & Funk, A. (2019). Freedom on the net 2019: The crisis of social media. Freedom on the Net. Freedom House.
Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G. L., Varol, O., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2017). The spread of fake news by social bots. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07592 , 96-104.
Stronski, P., & Ng, N. (2018). Cooperation and competition: Russia and China in Central Asia, the Russian far east, and the arctic (Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 14). Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Thieltges, A., Papakyriakopoulos, O., Serrano, J. C. M., & Hegelich, S. (2018). Effects of Social Bots in the Iran-Debate on Twitter. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.10105
Tucker, J. A., Theocharis, Y., Roberts, M. E., & Barberá, P. (2017). From liberation to turmoil: social media and democracy. Journal of democracy, 28(4), 46-59.
Vaismoradi, M., Turunen, H., & Bondas, T. (2013). Content analysis and thematic analysis: Implications for conducting a qualitative descriptive study. Nursing & health sciences, 15(3), 398-405.
Weeks, B. (2018). Media and political misperceptions. In Misinformation and Mass Audiences. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 127–137.
Woolley,S. (2018). The Political Economy of Bots: Theory and Method in the Study of Social Automation. In The Political Economy of Robots: Prospects for
Wojcieszak, M., Smith, B., and Enayat, M. (2013). Finding a Way - How Iranian Reach for News and Information. Iran Media Program. Retrieved from
http://repository.upenn.edu/iranmediaprogram/3
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2021-12-30
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