Zahra Majdizadeا; Hamideh Molaei
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the voice of Iranian Diaspora in Cyberspace. In particular it seeks to explore their concerns regarding their home country, Iran and to explore their ...
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This study aims to investigate the voice of Iranian Diaspora in Cyberspace. In particular it seeks to explore their concerns regarding their home country, Iran and to explore their role and influence in the formation of Iran-related contents on Twitter. While the formation of Iranian Diaspora was before the rise of new Information and Communication Technologies, the rise of the aforementioned technological improvements have had an influential role to make their voice heard in offline and online spheres, in particular in Twitter. Having conducted content analysis, the results of the study showed that Iranian Diaspora play a key role in content creation in online sphere and in particular in Twitter. However, the results also indicated that there is a multi step flow of information in their online network given that their main hubs are only few Iranian Diasporia organizations that are established in the host countries. In addition, the results of analyzing 270 selected tweets from Iranian Diasporas indicates that 'criticizing the situation in Iran", "Covering the news regarding protest and propagating them" and "relatively neutral news and information" were the dominant themes and topics twitted –and re twitted _by them.
