The art of delirium: social media suppression in authoritarian regimes

Abstract

In spite of the existing literature, which focuses mainly on Western contexts, this article argues that malicious activities on social media, particularly Twitter, are not limited to false information and bot activism in non-democratic societies. I argue that authoritarian regimes aim to suppress any kind of meaningful action on social media by bombarding users with a sheer of true and false messages. The aim is to create what Hannah Arendt calls a “non-thinking situation.” Therefore, this research hypothesizes that authoritarian regimes devise novel practices and agents to dismantle counternarratives on Twitter. In order to identify these practices and agents, this article focuses on Women, Life, Freedom, i.e., #MahsaAmini, movement on Persian Twitter. Drawing on Arendt’s ideas on storytelling and Informational Learned Helplessness (ILH) theory; I conducted a longitude digital ethnography combined with Social Media Critical Discourse Studies on Persian Twitter from April 2022 to February 2024. Results reveal that the Iranian regime used traditional techniques but also developed new strategies like fabricated stories and new actors like undercover agents to suppress the #MahsaAmini movement. This article empirically investigates these actors and strategies to contribute to the extant research on nefarious social media activities in contemporary societies.