Speculative survival through capital commodity in a rentier economy: representation of inflation on Iranian social media

This study explores the Iranian public’s perception of economic inflation, emphasizing the representation and subsequent attitudes across different commodity categories. Using data from X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram between October 2022 and November 2023, this study applies quantitative content and sentiment analyses on over 6.3 million posts, comparing social-media representation with official inflation data. Computational social science methods, such as data mining, facilitated the data collection. The results reveal a hierarchy of representation: capital commodities (housing, cars, and gold) receiving the most attention, followed by essential and lastly non-essential ones, with little to no consistent correlation between inflation rate and representation. A negative binomial regression confirms that inflation itself is not a significant predictor of public attention, while commodity type, particularly capital commodities, exerts a strong independent effect. Sentiment analysis shows that positive reactions to capital commodity inflation exceed those for essential by a factor of 5.1 and non-essential by 18. Therefore, the emphasis on capital commodities is not merely a response to living-cost crisis or perceptual bias, but reflects collective economic memory and experience under a rentier-crony capitalist system. In this Global South context, speculative behaviors towards capital commodities emerge as a socially-reinforced survival strategy to preserve wealth.