COVID-19 Pandemic Tweets by Iranian Political Elites: A Content Analysis Study

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, political elites in Iran have tried to use social media to express their views, influence public opinion or criticize the government's performance in managing Covid-19 disease. The aim of this study was to investigate and analyze the tweets related to this Pandemic that were tweeted by Iranian political elites.

This qualitative study is conducted based on the method of content analysis. A list of political elites likely to run for presidency in 1400 presidential election was selected by referring to public and specialized political news websites, their Twitter accounts were identified and all their Persian and English tweets about COVID-19 until the end of 2020 were collected and reviewed. Content analysis method was used for analyzing the tweets.

More than 2,800 tweets from 27 political elites were reviewed. About 18% of the total tweets during this period were related to health and about 84% of the health tweets had COVID-19 content. All tweets related to COVID-19 were categorized under six main themes; notices; policy recommendation; criticism of government performance; situation analysis and future forecasting; warnings and Macroeconomic, social and political issues.

In recent years, the use of Twitter among Iran's political elites has increased significantly. It seems that the tweets of the political elites can influence the public’s views and behaviors as well as the government performance in a major way, leading the government to be more accountable in responsible management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The health system can also make more use of the social network's capacity to inform programs, attract support and disseminate health and prevention perspectives.