Networked Publics in Farsi Twitter; an Analysis of the Twitter Network Clusters

This paper examines how the networked publics on Twitter are taking shape in Iran. While Twitter's role in political events has increased, the systematic study on this issue has not grown as expected. Accordingly, considering the importance of Twitter in Iran as well as the role of networking publics in Twitter, the first step in analyzing Twitter's role in politics in Iran is to identify and analyze the characteristics and structure of such network publics. The purpose of this research paper, therefore, is to identify and analyze the structure of networking publics on Persian web site. We collected the necessary data during the 25 days of the presidential election of 2017. To do such research, in addition to using the theoretical concept of the public, we have combined the methods of social network analysis and ethnographic content analysis. The modularity of clusters indicates that there are three main clusters in the retwit network as follows: 1- the reformists' cluster, 2- the fundamentalists' cluster, and 3- Immigrant cluster. To describe the features of these three, we identified active users of each one based on the PageRank index. The findings indicate that active users are often made up of journalists, the media, and ordinary citizens. There is also a significant gender gap in the network of publics. Most of the members' accounts of these publics remained active after the election, but the members of these three network publics are different from each other in terms of their true identity.