Decoding Telegram: Iranian Users and ‘Produsaging’ Discourses in Iran’s 2017 Presidential Election

Abstract

This paper investigates the most-viewed posts in Persian Telegram channels during the period surrounding Iran’s 2017 presidential election. Telegram has become the most popular social medium in Iran, and its channels have played a significant role in recent social and political events. Based on the produsage theory and user-generated content concept, this research identifies the popular content and produsagers on Persian Telegram channels. Moreover, this paper evaluates the potential of these most-viewed posts to support or challenge the dominant discourses in Iran. Using a combination of content and discourse analyses, results show that user-generated content on Telegram supports and reinforces dominant discourses relatively strongly, rather than challenging them. They also show that politics and entertainment were the most popular content on Telegram and confirm that Telegram is usually considered a good tool for receiving information and news.

Telegram para el ejercicio de la comunicación interna: Análisis de su uso en universidades hispanohablante

“…En un contexto digital volátil, con la aparición y desaparición de medios sociales cada pocos años, y la consecuente adaptación continua a la que están obligadas las instituciones (Gómez-Calderon y Paniagua-Rojano, 2014), consideramos necesario abordar el estudio de Telegram, una herramienta de comunicación digital de incipiente penetración en el entorno hispanohablante y poco investigada hasta la fecha (Kermani, 2020).…”

News loopholing: Telegram news as portable alternative media

“…Interestingly, since 2013 most of Telegram’s worldwide visits have come from Iran. With 25 million active users in 2016 [ 35 ], the number of Iranian users jumped to 40 million in 2018 [ 45 ] and more than 50 million users by the end of the same year Kermani [ 12 , 36 ] stated that in June 2017, 69.9% of Telegram’s visitors were Iranians. These numbers undoubtedly highlight the vital role the messaging app plays in mass communication inside Iran.…”

“…Regarding usage purposes, a 2017 survey found that 70% of Iranians use Telegram for messaging peers and 18% use it for entertainment purposes, with half of those surveyed saying they trusted and, therefore, favoured news coming from Telegram versus traditional state-run Iranian media [ 67 ]. Moreover, in 2017 Telegram had more than 380,000 Persian channels with over two million posts published daily [ 36 , p. 4]. More importantly, Marchant et al [ 45 ] emphasize that much more research needs to be conducted to “effectively map the structure and dynamics of Persian-language Telegram, and additional tools are required to adapt to the specific challenges of Telegram’s … networks, a hybrid between a traditional social media platform and a conventional messaging app” [ 45 , p. 38].…”

The Shape of the Asiascape: Ten Years of Digital Asia Research

“…' and social media (e.g. Fahadi 2022;Kermani 2020;Seto 2020, Sharbaugh & Nguyen 2014Tapsell 2014). Throughout, the most common concerns among scholars tended to be 'political' -a term with high frequency (Farooq 2022;Hicks 2017;Hussain & Lee 2021;Schmidt 2018;Sheikh 2021;Yang & Kang 2021), for instance, with regard to questions of citizenship and community (see Schneider 2019) as well as participation and democracy (see Lee 2021).…”