Analysis of the Political Activism of the Networked Publics on Twitter in the 2021 Iraqi Parliamentary Elections

The platform society refers to a social life in which political, cultural, social and communication flows are increasingly driven by algorithms and fed with data by a globalized ecosystem of online platforms. In such a society, different networked publics will have the characteristic of networking. This research seeks to investigate the political activism of Twitter networked publics during the 2021 Iraqi parliamentary elections.

The period under investigation is from two weeks before to two weeks after holding parliamentary elections in that country; Data collection was done by machine using Twitter API and random sampling was used to check the themes of networked publics. The analysis method in this research is a combination of social network analysis, sentiment analysis and thematic analysis.

Finally, 10 networked publics active on Twitter were identified and the content expressed by each was analyzed, the largest of which belongs to Sadrist Movement, which shows the compatibility of real and virtual space in this area.

Finally, it was concluded that creating a change in the pattern of communication norms and producing communication messages in line with the country's goals can be a suitable strategy to restore Iran's strategic influence at the international level and adopting confrontational approaches has always been a costly and low-yield method for movements attributed to the axis of resistance.