Bots Versus Humans: Discursive Activism During the Pandemic in the Iranian Twittersphere

Abstract

This article explores how the pandemic in Iran was discursively framed by automated accounts and human users. While there is a growing body of literature on bot activism, little is known about how bots and humans framed the pandemic in authoritarian regimes. Drawing on networked framing theory, we use both computational and qualitative methods to fill this gap. Our empirical analysis centers on a data set of 4,165,177 tweets collected between 27 January 2020 and 18 April 2020. We found that while anti-regime human users strongly criticized Iran’s regime, pro-regime bots countered with messages emphasizing the sacrifices of medical staff, the strength of Iran, and the failings of Western governments in managing the crisis. Our results suggest that Persian Twitter human users were largely against the regime, while the regime employed bots extensively to maintain balance. Human users used sarcasm, while pro-regime bots invoked religious and revolutionary sentiments metaphorically to defend the regime. By focusing on a relatively unexplored context, this article adds to the growing literature on bot activism.