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Twitter polarity and computational propaganda
How (tame) bots impact online political networks
The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in 2022, one of the largest protest movements in contemporary Iran, developed largely online. A collaboration between researchers from Warwick (PAIS) and Tehran traces the evolution of Persian Twitter before and after the event through networks of retweets, PageRank metric and automatic clustering for community detection. The resulting maps reveal a striking transition from a polarized (pro-state versus anti-state) to a unipolar structure, in contradiction with prior studies. Further evidence from the Twitter corpus and the Iranian context suggest that this shift was influenced by computational propaganda, especially orchestrated hashtag movements. Protesters managed to quickly raise an army of bots that amplified their voice and silenced state supporters for about three months. The study contributes to understanding how Twitter/X can be used to manipulate public discourse, in Iran and beyond.
Open access article, co-authored by Philippe Blanchard (PAIS) in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.