Social Media and domestic violence against women;Hashtag analysis and reaction of Instagram users to the murder of Romina Ashrafi

Social Media sites are now the main sphere for expressing emotions as well as being affected by news and social issues. Therefore, understanding the nature of this sphere is the root to understand user behavior and the role of cyberspace. In the current study, Instagram was selected, as the most important social media platform among Persian-speaking users (in terms of volume of users), to examine the domestic violence against women as an important social topic that has affected public opinion in recent years. In the current study, the subject of honor killing (murder of Romina Ashrafi) is assessed as one of the most acute forms of domestic violence.Through analyzing the Rumina_Ashrafi hashtag on Instagram, most of the content posted in this social media related to the incident was extracted. Out of 45,800 posts, 33,740 posts were sampled based on the most visits and the highest engagements. Then the content production timeline on Instagram was extracted and the posted content was also categorize using similar hashtags. In addition, during the study, the top posts, the most visited and most participated contents as well as the participating users were identified. Finally, with the netnographic method, the comments of the most visited posts were analyzed and categorized. This study tries to answer what kind of approach and behavior is more likely to be expressed by the social media users in the face of such incidents.