Online Performance of Civic Participation: What Bot-like Activity in the Persian Language Twittersphere Reveals About Political Manipulation Mechanisms

Ali Honari, Donya Alinejad*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we reveal the understudied transnational dimensions of politically manipulative activity on social media. Specifically, we identify and investigate a bot-like Twitter network associated with the controversial organization of Iranian political exiles, the Mojaheddin-e Khalgh (MEK). Tracing and contextualizing the Twitter debate around women’s rights within the 2016 Iranian Parliamentary election, our analysis contributes to the scholarship on diaspora and digital media by drawing attention to the often-neglected potentials for non-state actors such as diaspora groups to make use of social media to promote political propaganda that advances militarist violence. We demonstrate how the MEK network’s “online performance of civic participation” is typical of a bot-net of weak influence inside Iran, but that the aims and extent of its influence can only be fully understood by situating it within a historical and transnational analysis of Iranian diasporic media and politics, one that takes complex US-Iran diplomacy dynamics into consideration.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)917-938
Number of pages22
JournalTelevision and New Media
Volume23
Issue number8
Early online date9 Nov 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Author(s) 2021.

Keywords

  • diaspora politics
  • international relations
  • Iran
  • political manipulation
  • social media bots
  • Twitter

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