Ideology and Social Media in Iran; Instagram and Volunteer Propagandists

This research explores how the state aligned discourse are circulating on social media in Iran voluntarily. Considering all the ways of (mainly) autocratic states to control the social media; from reactive and direct ways like censorship to more proactive ways of flooding the internet space with dominant ideology, recent studies have also investigated more subtle and indirect ways like volunteer propagandists who are acting in line with the dominant discourse on social media. The users of social media, particularly in authoritarian contexts, have supposedly participated in propaganda in many proactive ways rather than just co-opting in censorship or simply hiding critical sentiments. As Uniacke (2021) claimed, ‘the limited space for self-expression is given to vetted individuals who either wholeheartedly buy in the state-imposed national brand or may feel compelled to promote it on behalf of the regime to secure a lucrative career as a popular social media influencer’. In one of the few studies to analyze the pro-regime disseminators, Abrahams and Leber (2021) mentioned the ‘organic’ supporters of the state. They argue that most of the pro-regime content in online media comes from organic regime supporters rather than a top-down process of manipulation by state officials and authorities. These organic pro-regime users are called ‘Cyber knights’ who ‘enjoy wide following and wield considerable clout which also their power to manipulate opinion has not gone unnoticed by authoritarian regimes’ (p.1192). This research will investigate sample celebrities accounts on Instagram to explore the discursive ways in the published posts which helped the regime aligned ideas and ideologies to be released on social media particularly in critical times. In more detail, I will examine posts published between September 2022 and September 2023 by 17 celebrity accounts (of which 12 reside in Iran, 5 living out of country) each with over one million followers. Reviewing posts published during this timeframe will provide a discursive analysis of past (recent) events. This research follows these questions: • How do Iranian celebrities reproduce the most common state-aligned concepts through ideological narratives on Instagram? Sub questions: • Which ideological narratives are being circulated by celebrities on Instagram? • Which rhetorical appeals and discourse techniques have been used by celebrities in reproducing ideological narratives? In my analysis, I will use content analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA). Content analysis, through coding, will identify the posts relevant to my research aim, and critical discourse analysis will reveal the key ideological discourses and hidden approaches present in the content.