Online harassment is increasingly applied as a form of information control to curb free speech and exert power in online public spheres. In recent years, states have appeared to be particularly invested in weaponizing information against dissidents in an attempt at dominating social and political discourses. Reports by prominent human rights institutions, as well as anecdotal evidence, indicate that Iran remains among the states with a track record of such actions. The scope of targeted cyber abuse varies by case. This study investigates the size and perpetrators of online violence, harassment, and abuse against critical members of the Iranian diaspora, including journalists, civil society activists, and artists, among many others. This study substantiates findings of qualitative interviews with a quantitative study of Instagram accounts of related individuals and explores the patterns and communities involved in disseminating hate speech in an attempt at manipulating public opinion and suppressing voices of dissidents.
BlondelVDGuillaumeJLambiotteRet al. (2008) Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment2008(10): P10008.
BurnsAElthamB (2009) Twitter free Iran: an evaluation of Twitter’s role in public diplomacy and information operations in Iran’s 2009 Election Crisis. Communications Policy & Research Forum2009: 322–334.
13.
Center for Human Rights in Iran (2015) Khamenei Consolidates Power Over Internet Policy in Hard Line Council He Controls. Tehran, Iran: Center for Human Rights in Iran.
FeinsteinAFeinsteinSBehariMet al. (2016) The psychological wellbeing of Iranian journalists: a descriptive study. JRSM Open7(12): 2054270416675560.
22.
FincherLH (2018) Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China. London: Verso Books.
23.
GolkarS (2013) The Islamic republic’s art of survival: neutralizing domestic and foreign threats. Policy Focus no. 125, June. Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
HeydemannSLeendersR (2011) Authoritarian learning and authoritarian resilience: regime responses to the “Arab awakening.”Globalizations8(5): 647–653.
26.
HongLDavisonBD (2010) Empirical study of topic modeling in Twitter. In: MelvillePLeskovecJProvostF (eds) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics.New York: ACM, pp. 1–9.
KargarS (2017) Verification as a remedy for harmful speech online. In: Jansen ReventlowNet al. (eds) Perspectives on Harmful Speech Online. Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Publication, pp. 46–48.
KhiabanyG (2008) The Iranian press, state, and civil. In: SematiM (ed.) Media, Culture and Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State. London: Routledge, pp. 17–36.
PearceKE (2015) Democratizing kompromat: the affordances of social media for state-sponsored harassment. Information, Communication & Society18(10): 1158–1174.
38.
RahimiB (2003) Cyber dissent: the internet in revolutionary Iran. Middle East Review of International Affairs7(3): 101–115.
39.
RahimiB (2008) The politics of the Internet in Iran. In: SematiM (ed.) Media, Culture and Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State. London: Routledge, pp. 37–56.
40.
RauchfleischASchäferMS (2015) Multiple public spheres of Weibo: a typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China. Information, Communication & Society18(2): 139–155.
41.
Reporters without Borders (2017) One of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists. Available at: https://rsf.org/en/iran
42.
RidT (2013) Cyber War Will Not Take Place. New York: Oxford University Press.
43.
RobertsME (2018) Censored: Distraction and Diversion inside Chinas Great Firewall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
44.
RobertsMEStewartBMTingleyDet al. (2014) Structural topic models for open-ended survey responses. American Journal of Political Science58(4): 1064–1082.
45.
ShirkyC (2011) The political power of social media: technology, the public sphere, and political change. Foreign Affairs90: 28–41.
TaghvaKBeckleyRSadehM (2003) A list of farsi stopwords. ISRI Technical Report 2003-01, 2003. Las Vegas, NV: Information Science Research Institute, University of Nevada.
VatankaA (2015) Iran abroad. Journal of Democracy26(2): 61–70.
56.
WoolleySCHowardPN (2018) Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
