Investigating the Motivation to Use Emoji among Iranian Media Activists on Twitter

Today, the invention of emojis has led to the emergence of a new language for communication in social networks. This research is practical in terms of purpose and cross-sectional in terms of implementation and was conducted with the aim of investigating and comparing the motives of using emojis among Iranian media activists on Twitter. The population of this research was the members of the Journalist Association of Tehran province and the selected sample included 40female journalists and 40male journalists with more than 3years work experience and active on Twitter. The data were collected and analyzed through a researcher-made questionnaire, SPSS software version26 and Kolmogorov-Smironov and Student's independent t-tests. Based on the results, women and men use emojis in the text of their tweets to express emotions, to replace verbal communication signs, to replace words, to help understand the message, to soften the tone. The message, information transmission, shortening of the text, sufficient variety of emojis, and the possibility of inappropriate perception of the message had similar conditions to a large extent; But there were significant differences in the motivations of people's level of intimacy, making the message attractive, frequent use of emojis and a way to judge people.