Social Media, Polarization, Populism and Democratic Movements: A Case Study on Iran

• In Event: Populism Goes Digital

Abstract

Iran has one of the oldest pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. This movement started from the Constitutional Revolution in 1905 and has soared on various periods, including the 1950s oil-nationalization movement, the 1979 revolution, and the reform movement (1997–2005). After the controversial 2009 presidential election, the mass protests, known as the Green Movement, were another exhibition of this movement.

The Green Movement was one of the world's first movements to use social media extensively to make up for the lack of civil society organizations and bypass government censorship. Social media even facilitated the victory of moderate candidate Hassan Rouhani in 2013 and 2016. Nevertheless, as the initial hopes for social media to spread democracy have faded, social media's impact on Iran's democratic movement has come into focus in recent years.

This article addresses the question of how much social media has helped to undermine the democratic movement in Iran over the past two years. We use the data mining techniques to study this impact on three levels: activists, institutions, and discourse.

In the first part, we argue that the tense political polarization in Persian social media has undermined the pro-democracy activists. We study the Iranian Twitter accounts, Instagram pages, and Telegram Channels with the most followers. We argue that moderate pro-democracy activists have lost their followers, while both pro- and anti-government pages have attracted more followers. We also analyze the likes of some political users on Twitter to show this polarization trend.

In the second part, we study the role of social media in the legitimacy of democratic institutions. By examining the hashtags related to parliament and the presidency as the most important democratic institutions in Iran, we argue that they have played a role in weakening these two institutions' position among Iranians in the past two years. This trend might explain the low turnout in the 2020 election, the lowest turnout in a parliamentary election since the 1979 revolution.

In the third part, this study focuses on the discourse generated by Persian social media and identifies a strong anti-elite tendency among users that threatens democratic movement and boost populism.

In analyzing the reasons for these recent anti-democratic waves in Persian social media, we point three reasons. First, President Rouhani's administration as a moderate, elite backed government, which came to power with the support of pro-democracy forces, has failed to fulfill its promises. On the other hand, Persian social media platforms have turned into a battleground for bot armies created by Iran and its adversaries (the U.S, Israel, and Saudi Arabia). The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps created a cyber army, and the Trump administration funded a project called Iran Disinfo that disparaged Iranian activists opposing the U.S.'s maximum pressure policy against Iran. Finally, the global march of right-wing nationalism and populism might be the third explanation of this anti-democratic wave in Persian social media.

Authors

• Vahid Abedini, Florida International University

• Mohammad Rahbari, Allameh Tabataba'i University