Protesting is Not Everything: Analyzing Twitter Use During Electoral Events in Non-democratic Contexts

Abstract

Despite the fact that during political protests, Twitter usage has been substantially studied in various contexts, there are still some significant gaps in our understanding of the ways that this microblogging network is employed in regular political happenings, e.g., elections, particularly in authoritarian countries. As a result, it remains unclear if citizens in non-democratic countries use Twitter to protest at the time of regular political events as the time of uprisings or not. This investigation tries to address this gap by providing some empirical evidence from the Iranian Twittersphere during the 2017 presidential election. Having employed networked framing theory, we combined textual and network analytic approaches to investigate a sample of 10,416 tweets of the most influential users in the retweet (RT) network. Findings demonstrate that Iranian users did not significantly challenge the regime and power relations in Iran. They framed the election in a non-critical way dealing with routine political and election frays and debates. They also preferred to attack politicians rather than discuss contentious and deliberate politics. Thus, this research reveals that Twitter is not always a tool for protesting against non-democratic regimes. At the time of electoral events, it could be used as an ordinary communication platform.