Decoding political field on Persian Twitter: Analyzing political activism by Iranian users during Iran’s 2017 presidential election

In this study, I propose the idea of political field on Persian Twitter. Based on Bourdieu’s field theory, I argue that political activism on Twitter caused the emergence of an imaginary field on this microblogging network. Analyzing political field on Persian Twitter could help us to reach a better understanding of Iranian users’ political participation and activism. In order to do this, I combined social network analysis, ethnographic content analysis and social media critical discourse study approach. The research sample was consisted of 10416 tweets of the 150 most influential users in three networked publics which were collected during Iran’s 2017 presidential election. Results showed that the struggle on power on Persian Twitter is mainly about everyday matters and election-related debates. Moreover, political field on Persian Twitter is not a site for challenging hegemonic values and producing new ones, it is a sphere to use existed values to overcome political rivals.