FIonPT · Fabricating Twitter: Social media narratives, political dissidence, and false information in Iran

Fabricating Twitter: Social media narratives, political dissidence, and false information in Iran

False information has become a major concern in contemporary societies. With the rapid growth and popularity of social media communication, bad actors, e.g., non-democratic forces, employ them to share disinformation and toxitize user-generated discourses. Such suppressive actions are of paramount significance in authoritarian countries like Iran. In Western democracies, most people have access to a variety of communication channels. As a result, social media is only another tool at their disposal. In non-democratic societies, however, social media like Twitter are the citizens’ only chance to seek sensitive information and raise their voices beyond regime restrictions and censor machines. Therefore, making these spaces toxic and overwhelming them with false messages and inaccurate information deprives people of the sole chance to create more democratic systems. Thus, it is critical to investigate through which discursive mechanisms and to which extent authoritarian regimes share inaccurate information on social media. FIonPT investigates how false information is shared and circulated in the Iranian Twittersphere. It aims to identify the networks and practices of false information in which Twitter activism is suppressed from the inside in Iran. While authoritarian regimes employ hard measures like internet blockage and online surveillance to stop people from using social media, they also develop proactive tactics like sharing false information. Therefore, investigating their tactics could inform people in such countries and help them overcome such suppressive strategies. It could eventually help them to fight with regime-sponsored disinformation campaigns. This research could be of interest even from a Western perspective. Many of these suppressive tactics have found their way to social media in Western countries in recent years. In addition, non-democratic countries like Russia usually orchestrate disinformation campaigns to mislead Western citizens. Therefore, understanding in which ways and through which mechanisms bad actors work in online spaces could also weaponize Western citizens with the knowledge they require to compete with them. FIonPT produces this knowledge with a focus on an understudied context: Iran.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз