Incivility, domination, and resistance: rhetorical practices on Persian Twitter during the #MahsaAmini movement

This study investigates how and to what extent Iranian users employ and discursively articulate uncivil language during the Women, Life, Freedom movement on Persian Twitter (X). Despite the substantial line of inquiry into hate speech and incivility, our understanding of the ways different user communities employ them during anti-regime protests in non-democratic societies is still niche. To address this gap, our empirical analysis focuses on a dataset of 36,255 popular Persian tweets published by 4807 users during the first months of the movement. Drawing on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS), we qualitatively and discursively analyzed users’ metadata and tweets, with five trained coders applying inductive and deductive coding to identify political communities and rhetorical strategies. Findings reveal that the pro-regime radical community was the most uncivil group. Pro-regime users sarcastically and metaphorically shared uncivil tweets to dominate the network and establish their power. On the other hand, anti-regime users employ incivility as an act of resistance to some extent. In addition, the attacks did not target users’ characteristics such as gender and ethnicity. This research contributes to our understanding of how different political communities on Twitter employ various forms of incivility and the rhetorical practices through which they articulate uncivil tweets. The findings challenge Western-centric models of hate speech by demonstrating that in an authoritarian protest context, the primary driver for uncivil attacks is political ideology rather than protected characteristics. This suggests that content moderation policies may need context-specific adaptations.